Dumb Looks Still Free

Two scandals, one theme

2009-11-23T09:47:00.002-05:00

There are two recent scandals that have very similar themes to them, and their parallels are interesting.

Phase I : The Start

First is the Madoff Ponzi Scheme started by a then young and up-and-coming investor who demonstrated some knowledge of the market and decent returns. He decided on a methodology of using secret sets of data for market forecasting and putting out graphs that showed a steady return on investment, year on year, if you just invested with him. A few inside members of his family and financial coterie knew that was nearly impossible to do, yet he was able to show the payouts. If the market went up, he went up steadily and if the market went down, he went up steadily: Bernie Madoff obviously had a secret way to know just which companies to invest in to yield that steady return on investment. He could show graphs of market sectors and show how his earnings correlated with some, but not all, market segments and that by the investing system he had, he could show that his services could obviously steady out market fluctuations and do better than just track the market.

Second are the individuals who put out a paper in the mid-1990's that demonstrated that a group of trees in Siberia were following 'instrument' readings and that there was a steady amount of 'global warming' witnessed elsewhere, too. Indeed they could show that carbon dioxide was a 'secret ingredient' to global warming and that the trees tracked that perfectly and were good measures for temperatures. They then had a select sub-set of trees that were claimed to be representative of the whole and tracked the whole very well and were useful as indicators for whole forests. That secret sub-set of trees wasn't put out, and its data held outside of greater review by the scientific community. Whenever questions of temperature fluctuations arose, they could point to the predictive 'hockey stick' graph that proved that the entire system was warming year on year, regardless of fluctuations. Not all indicators could be explained away by this, of course, but the claim was that they had 'other factors' and 'weren't indicative' of the whole planetary climate. By using a secret subset of data and special interpretations, those pushing global warming claimed that their methodology was superior to any others.

Phase II: The Deception

Madoff flouted the regulatory schema, and even was able to win popular approval for his work from regulators who would over-look minor problems and even recommend that he address Congress on financial matters. That ability to ride out the internet bubble surely showed that he had some great way to beat the averages. Yet, even by the late 1990's, a market analyst and mathematician was showing that the financial numbers that Madoff published could not be right: they were based on market factors that demonstrated volatility and he was inflating numbers beyond what the market return would allow him to do. Even with that regulators would not examine the Madoff Empire, and he still had the ears of those in the halls of power in DC and easily continued his 'market beating scheme' for years, gulling people with his lovely numbers that were not sustainable when analyzed. Yet he convinced regulators who investigated that all was on the up-and-up and that his books were in order. Really!

Critics of global warming started to notice that there was a non-correlation between graph data actual data, that there was something badly askew from what those publishing the data purported and what the data showed. Yet, by then, those pushing the line of alarmist global warming had already won over the minds of politicians and power brokers, and used their power to stifle the opposition. They would use their names at prestigious venues to continue showing that their numbers were 'right' and that they were, indeed, on the up-and-up. As other global data sets acted in non-accordance with the hypothesis of 'global warming' those pushing it then resorted to culling data, showing incomplete data sets and purporting that they were the whole thing. Yet when publications came in to ask 'where is the data' and 'how do we know its verifiable', the supporters would show their sub-sets and show that their books were in order. Really!

Phase III: The Cat Let Out of the Bag is a Beast

The day came during an economic downturn when a number of investors in the Madoff Scheme needed their money. One or two Madoff could handle, but when heavy investors started to ask for their money, they got subterfuge, excuses, and partial payouts. Something was up and when those representing the individuals holding funds in the Madoff Scheme examined the record, they found the financial and mathematical analyst that had, for years, been showing that there was something seriously wrong with what Madoff was doing. Even with that regulators were put off, but not permanently, and as the number of customers grew, the hue and cry increased and Madoff finally had to do something. When the numbers started to come out the Ponzi Scheme was revealed, and it was massive, the largest ever seen.

The day came when a number of skeptics and journals started to demand the original datasets on tree rings, as later evaluation of the actual forests and trees revealed a non-correlation between long published data and the current data. Graphs had been broken down, analyzed and shown to have some data sets grafted on to others, and yet other sets 'adjusted' by yet other sets of data, all which tended to skew the results being shown. The day came when those holding the data had to respond, publish a paper and also release the data set to a third party. When that data got out, others started to raise questions on methodology and measuring practices, and if the original researchers had considered that there were systemic errors in data sets they used. Still the supporters used their contacts to put off such hard questions, and when governmental requests for information came in, the researchers stalled or claimed to have 'lost the data'. Finally, one day, the data sets that had been used for multiple papers were released, along with the documentation on what was being presented, what held back and why. The scheme to distort the numbers so as to get certain ends out of the political system, be it mere grants and contracts or larger payoffs via industrial regulation changes, were revealed to be a huge fraud in the scientific arena, far surpassing Lysenkoism and the Piltdown Man scandal. Truly no one had ever seen such a distortion of science before.

As I have always said: you must show me the numbers, that is the actual, real data, on global warming for me to even consider it as a hypothesis. Now the numbers are coming out and just like with Madoff, they don't add up.

Phase IV for Madoff was trial(s) and imprisonment for fraud.

Phase IV for 'global warming' is just starting and those involved in it will continue to use anything in their means to put of a day of reckoning. The reason there will be no Cophenhagen Treaty on Global Warming, is that there is something rotten in the State of Denmark that global warming activists have brought with them.

Foundations of law

2009-11-13T10:31:00.001-05:00

The following is from The Jacksonian Party.

The following is a white paper of The Jacksonian party.

After spending some time examining the historical documents that examine the law in practice and its basis, I have determined that a better way to describe what our modern, civil law has become should start at a more practical level starting at the basis of what we are, as humans. From there proceeding to our more modern views of law should give some basis for further understanding what the strengths, limitations and limits of our laws are. To any who have read at this site, this is more a summary article than one breaking new ground and may be of little interest save in that summary basis. As there are many aspects of the universe that can only be answered through venues of faith, philosophy and religion I must, necessarily, put those aspects of what the law is off, at least to the point where mankind can formulate those things. With that said, and not to exasperate phenomenology practitioners, we must understand that we do, indeed, have a form, an existence and a basis of time and space that we experience.

The question of what time actually is, or space for that matter, I have covered elsewhere when looking at the problems of science in science fiction. Whatever the general basis for time is, as individuals we must live with the consequences of our actions taken and the universe also reflects that events have happened in one way and not another, albeit others are acceptable in scientific terms, they are not the ones we have to deal with. Thus our basis is that of natural beings in a natural universe that has had a series of events, large and small, happen to it with the least of that measure being our time alive at the current moment. As we are physical beings in a natural universe, we partake of the aspects of that universe covering everything from sub-atomic interactions to the motions of galaxies, all of the chemistry, physics and time related events are what we are to contend with. That entire gamut of forces, energy, space and time are summed up under the concept of: Law of Nature.

This concept often comes with the tag line 'red of tooth and claw', and such is the Natural Universe and its Laws as they play no favorites. Nature, like Justice, is blind, save that the tools of Nature trump those of Justice as something being 'Just' is a biased view of Nature and Nature, above all things, is unbiased in the whole. One of the great and age-old questions is 'why do bad things happen to good people?' and never is asked 'why do good things happen to bad people?' or good to the good and bad to the bad. While our presence in this universe of Natural Law is biased, in that we have personal bias towards certain ends, the universe, in its whole, doesn't care about that, about us or about Justice. We flee from injustice aimed at us and head towards Nature as it is unbiased and we can craft survival on our own and worry about biased others as part of our greater survival needs. When we are threatened with doom by unjust society, Nature in its even-handedness towards the Just and Unjust, alike, is preferable to injustice perpetrated upon us by others. In trading the Tyrant for the Wolf, we go from a decidedly biased organization to one that is merely Natural and we understand that our status varies by our own hand and is determined by our skills, not by our value to a Tyrant. Thus if we bemoan when 'bad things happen to good people' then we must also recognize the succor and relatively safety of Nature in being unbiased and without Justice. We cannot cheer for the Partisan resisting Tyranny from Nature and then bemoan that Nature plays no favorites and visits ill upon the Just and Unjust alike, as well as good fortune upon both.

Survival in Nature requires working with what Nature does in the Laws of Nature, and then finding ways to mitigate the actions of Nature or use them to advantage. Reproduction allows this and reproductive strategies have many facets for survival, although we are used to thinking that only one is best, that is the outcome of a long series of events that get to our using one method and being temporally successful in the present. Yet examination of Nature shows that many other species use many different modes to reproduce, and they all have varying degrees of success and failure that cannot be predetermined as being successful in the future. Thus plants give off pollen during their pollination season in the hopes that one, tiny, pollen grain will find its home in the receptive parts of another plant of the same species so as to fertilize it, and that then allows for a seedling to form, drop and suffer the vicissitudes of Nature. It is not a guaranteed success, per plant, but for all plants it has proven to be a wonderful means of spreading species and causing allergies. Many sea animals release thousands if not millions of egg to be fertilized by the sperm of their species counter-parts and then those eggs, fertilized and unfertilized, find their fate in Nature. Some species find this to be ill-suited to survival and tend the eggs until they released a juvenile of their species, and for some that is the extent of their caring. Fewer still will create bonds between themselves and a mate or their young, or both, so as to spend time and energy ensuring the survival of a few of their young. All of these strategies are sound, utilize what their beings have as internal structures, and then exploit venues that allow for successfully passing on genetic material from generation to generation.

Most species fail.

Nature's harvest of species represents 95%+ of all species that have ever existed now being extinct. That is the way of Nature, and no species is immortal just as no natural being is immortal, either. Our race against death and extinction is temporary, although we do try to make our existence worthwhile and to ensure the greatest chance of survival to our offspring. This latter, as we have seen, is a survival strategy bequeathed to us by our lineage both ancient and recent. Within Nature animals within a species have used the raising of offspring as a major way to ensure genetic heritage being passed onwards. Also within Nature we observe that numbers of individuals of a species of diverse genetic background can come together for self-protection. Some that do this do it without conscious thought, while others have conscious discrimination although it is driven by instinct. Evidence of this behavior crosses all lines of species, and is not held just for herbivores or omnivores or carnivores, and even plants that cooperate between members of a species to crowd out other species can be thought of as having this instinct for survival. Thus man is an animal of nature in that way and our distinctive characteristics are few and telling.

At one time the ability to use tools and create tools was thought as distinctive to humanity, however observation of primates, great apes and avian species now demonstrates otherwise, as they are able to form tools to go after insects in hives and otherwise create direct use tools to do things. What separates hominids from this is the ability to use tools to create tools and then extrapolate that outwards as a meta-concept. Recursive tool creation, making tools to make tools to make tools to craft a final, useful item, is something restricted to hominids, of which humans may be the last of that lineage. That, however, is a hard characteristic to determine and while it sets us apart in thinking it does not set us apart by Nature, which is to say it is a distinguishing characteristic of hominids but not determinative of being human. Even something like the use of fire and creation of fire falls into this category of distinguishing sole characteristic, but not a determinative one. You can tell a human does these things which makes that animal a human, but this does not speak to those things which create humanity.

If our tools, use of fire and artifacts do not create humanity, then we must look elsewhere into our nature as being that do so. This must then be in our social nature as individuals and how we utilize that beyond other animals. At base our decision for mating, keeping a mate and raising children is not one that is truly unique amongst species, as many species have this in evidence across all species types, although there is difficulty in finding this in the plant kingdom due to the nature of plants being rooted in one spot and having little choice of mates. Plants may have community, indeed a climax forest of one plant dominating all others points to just such a thing, but it is not one driven by more than suitability to climate and habitat, with some characteristics to crowd out other species for that climate and habitat. In that the Law of Nature holds. Amongst other animals we do see conscious choice in mates amongst individuals and this happens in many species. What is seen with that, however, is the push by intrinsic nature upon conscious decision making, to that end of nature of procreation. There is an ability to reject mates in many species, and pick and choose amongst suitors from those present and even to bond with a suitable one for life is not unknown. Humans are not tied to a mating season, however, and our conscious quest for a suitable mate goes beyond any single season or year, and until we can do that and find a way to find good mates via conscious means, we can do without such a mate. When our means are enacted, either by the further creations that we make to get that decision or directly, we then establish that direct link and create something wholly different from the Natural world.

Our formation of society rests not upon instinct but upon conscious decision outside of the realm of mating. We may create many things to do this for us in that final creation of society, such as 'matchmakers' but that is also a conscious decision and our ability to say otherwise, as individuals, can still be upheld. When that decision over-rides personal decision to our detriment, the system is determined to be tyrannical and inimical to us and must either assent to our declining it or we must find suitable society that supports such decisions. Here the creation of something to sustain that choice, something that is not driven by instinct but conscious thought, creates the thing that few others in the animal kingdom have: society. Forming society is conscious, driven by our thoughts, and voluntary in that we may choose not to be in a society that upholds certain forms and yet we do uphold that society is necessary to uphold those forms we desire. While we do create this society in the Earthly realm, it is not held to the Law of Nature alone but to our own conscious creative spirit that is held within all individuals who uphold that society. When we recognize that we can do this and do so consciously, we set ourselves apart with a distinguishing and determinative characteristic of that subset of hominids known as Homo Sapiens. To extrapolate out, to add the meta-thought that this is an actual new creation by us within the realm of Nature is something that makes us unique beyond physique and tools, thus creating Homo Sapiens Sapiens and a new order of Law.

This is the Law that allows societies to be created and for our mutual bonds to be upheld by society and to use our natural liberty to seek out societies that uphold such bonds. This is not Civil Law which is an outgrowth of society, but a greater Law that is one we must hold voluntarily to have society. At that moment we consciously recognize that we seek out others to be with consciously, that we put a single meta-structure that describes the creation of other structures over those structures we have created a man-made form of Law that is separate from the Law of Nature and yet built upon it. We could not have such Law without Nature and yet Nature does not provide us with this Law and it is one we must make and discover for ourselves within the Law of Nature. This Law of creation of society forming at our bond with another person consciously, and consciously creating that bond between us has a name unique to it that is neither the Civil Law nor the Law of Nature.

It is the Law of Nations.

If any other species, no matter how primitive, utilizes conscious thought to create bonds amongst individuals and then seeks to create a further structure to uphold those bonds, which we call society, then they are voluntarily committing to the Law of Nations. I have examined the fact that we recognized such back in the 13th century and what that means to us, today, in a previous piece. This concept is foundational to all societies and to all of mankind, and is voluntarily committed to by us, even if we do not know we are doing it either through lack of forethought, lack of knowledge or lack of introspection on the meaning of these things we do. Yet, even if it is not recognized, not taught, not written it is a Law that is easily described and defined, and as the creation of any society rests upon the Law of Nations it can be rediscovered even if forgotten or even if it is actively not taught by those seeking tyranny over us. The reason that latter is true, is that it is true in the long run, not the short run. A successful ideology seeking to enslave all peoples may be able, for a time, to erase the written signatures of the Law of Nations, but because it is founding a society it, also, rests upon the Law of Nations and cannot do without it. This is why those civilizations that seek to put the imprimatur of a God upon a mere mortal will assuredly fail over time: that we are of Nature is self-evident, and that man is not Divine is likewise self-evident. Any society that allows such rests upon a deep lie that is contrary to our nature and to Nature itself. Likewise, any society that tries to 'remake' man into 'perfection' will find the absolute imperfection of the mortal realm as its long-term lethal enemy. As we are of Nature we cannot be made perfect and will always remain creatures of Nature no matter what we change ourselves into be it a workers paradise or a silicon based platform for thought, neither can do without Nature and has the flaws of Nature within it which is self-evident to thought.

All other orders of Law be it Civil Law created by society to uphold its norms or National Law to unify multiple societies into a Nation State or International Law between Sovereign Nation States, all of them must uphold the Law of Nations as that is foundational to them just as Nature is foundational to the Law of Nations. What the Law of Nations does is describe those things that we, as individuals, set aside to have in common as a society so that we may have society. The Law of Nations then becomes the structures that grow up around those set aside liberties and freedoms that we voluntarily acquiesce to having common governance over in society. There are a large number of things that we voluntarily give up to have society: Private Bondage for Crime, Private War, Private Execution of Law. Thus we agree that we, as individuals, are not judge, jury and executioner and must abide by the laws created by society, which are the Civil Laws, as part of being members of society. Likewise we cannot wage war Privately, which is to say without the sovereign grant of our society, as that would quickly lead to the downfall of all of society. So momentous an action would quickly dissolve society back into Nature as we set man against man, society against society by individual whim.

At this level of the Law of Nations we find that there is no creation of government as this is the Law necessary for the creation of government, not of government itself. Some of the provisos, actions, penalties and such that form the Law of Nations do get passed upwards to the organs of society made to administer our few relinquished liberties and freedoms in order to have society. With society comes governance and the creation of organs to execute those things held in common for our self-protection and the protection of our creation which is society. These things we enact then have their own realm of Law which is the Civil Law. By being the laws created by society and common practice of that society, it is local law. Civil Law varies from location to location, from place to place, from society to society and there may even be multiple different venues of local Civil Law within one locality. Town, Municipality, City, County and Province or State all overlap each other on local law venues and all execute Civil Law that is local. Whenever an issue is to be decided by members of society the proper local Civil Law must be utilized to address those needs. If a local venue at its lowest form of government is not suitable to an issue, it must then either be recognized as not incorporated into the local law or incorporated into a higher level of local law.

Local law is often referred to as 'customary law' and may have areas of it that are unwritten. The unwritten nature of local law makes it adaptable, flexible and capable of changing due to the changing nature of society. When such unwritten or 'customary' law is enacted as scripted or written law, it becomes much, much harder to change as it gains structures of government, administration and oversight by the organs of government that are made responsible for it. If all of life was to become law that is written down, then individuals would lose their civil liberty and become mere automatons of script with no conscious choice left to them. Yet the creative nature of man is such that not everything can or should be scripted and written down into law for government to oversee. To do so has been attempted in the past, in India with the Mahabharata and through the various Empires in China in which the administrative class once served as that class that kept absolute restriction upon society so that the structure ruled over the individual. Such deeply scripted societies can last for decades or even centuries, and yet when one unscripted event happens, the society is at a loss for how to deal with it and creativity is put to use to figure out what is happening. Some events may fit within the realm of what can be dealt with, say the Shogunate restricting coastal trade with medieval Korea, and yet may collapse entirely, as when Admiral Perry forced an opening for trade in the Shogunate. Medieval Europe could well be sustained with a numerous feudal class, but when war and plague wiped out a large percentage of that class the survivors were then relatively wealthy having inherited the wealth of the dead and that started a chain reaction that broke that feudal society asunder.

Thus, as in nature, a society that is scripted may have staying power but little resilience and succumb to the unexpected, as so many species have since the beginning of life on Earth. Be it Soviet Union, Sun Empire, Shogunate, European Medieval society, Roman Empire, Pharaohonic Egypt, Hittite Empire, Alexandrian Empire, Babylon, Sumeria, Persian Empire, or India under the Mahabharata's dictates, those societies have not withstood the test of time due to the heavy nature of the scripting between classes and individuals. And each of these conformed to having refined Civil Law at the National level, thus creating National Law. When local Civil Law has wide agreement within a larger organized Nation State, then those laws may be codified into National Law that is upon all parts of a Nation. Beyond that there are necessary Public Laws that must address the entirety of a Nation, such as trade, commerce, and how the Nation addresses sustaining the National government. As highly structured Nations seek refuge in that structure, so they become brittle by leaving too little to local variation.

From the structure of laws at this point, there is the following larger to smaller subsets seen:

First is the Law of Nature, which encompasses all of Nature, entire. It is the foundation for all laws made by Natural beings and is unbiased. It is involuntary law and all must abide by it.

Second is the Law of Nations, which is that law which allows societies to form and, from that, Nations. It is built upon the Law of Nature but separate from it as it is consciously made via our interactions with each other. This law is voluntary and to be a member of a society, any society, one submits to the Law of Nations so as to ensure one's own safety, the safety of other members of society and the safety of society itself. While unwritten law, it is easily recreated the moment society is formed and, thusly, is universal to all beings who possess liberty and freedom to form associations and create society consciously. As a structure the Law of Nations is unbiased, although individual societies will emphasize some parts of the Law of Nations over others. All societies, however, are governed by the Law of Nations and voluntarily abide by it.

Third is the Civil Law or customary law, which is local law of society. This is built upon the Law of Nations and is the method by which society creates those organs necessary to regulate the body of society on a local basis. By becoming a member of a society one agrees to abide by the Civil Law and to do so as long as one is a member of that society. When one is born into a society, one has no choice but to abide by the Civil Law and its consequences. Upon reaching an age of conscious understanding of society, one may seek to leave one's birth society and seek another society that is more in agreement with the beliefs, attitudes and life outlook of that individual. That is supported by the Law of Nations via the self-evident ability of man to consciously choose his form of outlook and join with a society that is agreeable to him. This is the realm of State Law, which is to say the organs of government representing localities that are delegated by society for such government to preside over.

Fourth is Public Law, which is Nation State law, and is the law for an entire Nation as a whole, not in its parts. Public Law represents the sovereign government of a Nation and that Nation State must abide by the structures set up for human interaction that are defined by the simplest of interactions via the Law of Nations. Any Nation State is a high stature creation of large societies or multiple societies having broad common agreement on governing principles or other societal venues that bring them closer together. As such the Public Law needs address the entire Nation State it represents in the continuum of other Nation States. Thus the Nation State is a similar organizing unit in concept to the local government, but gains absolute independence due to the fact it represents an independent society or set of societies with high common agreement amongst them. There is no larger or more sovereign power than a Nation State.

This then brings us to the fifth area of law which is International Law. This is the form of law governed by the universal and voluntary Law of Nations as any Nation rests upon the Law of Nations for its existence. As such Nation States as representative of independent societies are the sovereign organs of their societies and no Nation State is given preference or higher status within the Nation State system. With such a system of equals there is no other power to turn to as each society has its own biases, preferences and outlooks that are represented by the independent and sovereign Nation State. Thus all agreements that Nation States make are enforced only by those organs of society that create the Nation State, and any enforcement mechanism is likewise agreed-to voluntarily. As such any Nation State may break an international agreement unilaterally, on its own, without compunction nor reason given. The only repercussions faced are those imposed by other sovereign Nation States, not by a higher authority as there is none. In this widely recognized accords become familiar to societies and agreeable ways to function between Nations is found, yet this does not mean that they become beholden to those ways. Any society that finds the ways burdensome, alien or dangerous can, and should, rightly reject them especially when they put an entire people of a Nation at extreme risk and danger.

Summing up International Law, then, requires a recognition that it is a form of sovereign to sovereign contract law with either able to nullify the agreement at a moment's notice as that is the right of sovereignty. The dream of there being a world state is one that comes against that sovereignty and is a notion that is relegated to the form of state known as Empire. Any Empire that rules over a disparate set of subjects, climates, ethnicities and so on, soon finds the burden of trying to manage something that large to be impossible due to Civil Law at the local level. Some Empires have kept such local establishments going with over-arching provisos of the recognition of the Imperial State as the Supreme ruler, but they, too, have fallen time and again throughout history. The cracking point of all such grand schemes, be it a religious ideology of a single mass religion or a political one of a single world government, fall straight into the diversity of mankind at the local level. Smaller Nations can, for a time, impose top-down rule as can Empires, but even in relatively limited geographic circumstances the ability of such Nations to continue on without local upheaval dissolving such government is recognized to be nil. One dictatorial system may replace another, of course, and that has been seen in China, Russia, and elsewhere, which indicates some problems in societal understanding and cohesion more than an affiliation with the love of Tyrants and Despots. Even then such dictatorial rulers must abide by the fact that they, even in their extreme self-indulgence, must cater to the entirety of their ruling domain. Anointed Kings have found themselves in the hangman's noose or the mob's guillotine due to such lacks, and today the bullet becomes the end of those who believe that they are appointed to rule, not govern, for they have forgotten their place as an organ of society and in breaching the Law of Nations they find themselves at its sharp end.

If our modern era has any lacks it is understanding that most basic of laws that we create to separate ourselves from the Law of Nature, which is the Law of Nations. That the Law of Nations only deals with Nation States as a function of our ability to create society, itself, is lost upon our modern culture and society. There is a deep, dark space in our way of thought that presumes that the Civil Law or Public Law is the most supreme of all laws, and we even ignore the Law of Nature and presume to say that we can now rule Nature when we can not even govern ourselves well. It is in that darkness that we hear the voice of corruption and tyranny, whispering softly to us that just by entrusting more of our liberty and freedom to governments that all will turn out well. It whispers to us that mankind can, against all evidence against it, be perfected and is perfectible. The great sorrow and bloodshed that comes from the voice of unreason sweetly whispering to us is denied time and again, yet the copious dead to the pyre of perfection smells just as rank even if you call it sweet ambrosia. In believing that we can blame all our lacks on society and all our good will to government, we invert the actual nature of ourselves and forget that what we are saying is that government comes first, society second, while just the opposite is true.

In this mortal realm we are bidden to seek to be 'more perfect' and understand that the Law of Nature that brings us forth creates imperfection within us and all things that cannot be removed. No law has been so good that its best practitioners have not obeyed it, and even Moses, upon casting down the Tablets, ordered his fellow Israelites killed against the exact, same dictates he had just carried from the Mount. Yet when we seek to practice imperfection, to loft up the power of government over society and over the Law of Nations, we will find that this can be done... and then that great and awful edifice will fall, with great loss of life in both directions. No government is so wise as to be deemed all powerful, as it is made up of men and the creations of man, which are fallible, biased and prone to our corruption to ill ends. No leader is so wise as to be able to understand the daily lives of each of his subjects nor to rule over them in such a way as to tell each how to live. No people have created an eternal government full of wise and charitable leaders, that lead a penniless existence and only serve the ends of their Nation State. It would be humorous that there are those that hint that this is possible, if we could just ignore the gore and horror attendant to each and every time that is tried. Those preaching this are so wise that they have forgotten the founding Law that makes their existence possible, and then transgress the Law that makes such society as they live in possible by suggesting we don't need it if we only trust the infallible, all powerful, all knowing government that we, poor, frail and imperfect man creates. And the epitaph of those who preach this seems to be invariant:

"It seemed like a good idea at the time."

Survival - Phase 5 - Self-defense

2009-11-09T09:44:00.001-05:00

Self-defense is a subject rife with danger, and yet the ability to defend yourself is an inalienable right granted to you by Nature and recognized by all of mankind. Your surest, most ready defense is not an army nor a police force, both of which may take time to get to you if they can get to you, at all. Defense of yourself, your body, your life, your liberty and freedom rests upon no society, no government, no one but yourself. Your religious beliefs or beliefs derived from personal morals may not want to let you defend yourself, and that is granted: that is also your right. There is a fine line between self-defense and harming others, and varying levels of harming others that fall far short of absolutely lethal or being lethal at all. It takes a skilled martial artist to know just how to hit you with bare hands to kill you and the necessary self-discipline of the martial arts instructs those who follow them to not do that save as a last and least resort. That form of skill and self-restraint are not only laudable, but demonstrate a profound respect for those you encounter in the martial realm. By practicing the ancient and modern Arts Martial, the practitioners demonstrate honorable utilization of their skills to the lowest, possible cost to those they fight. As practitioners they must practice, constantly, and always keep their skills at bay for merely civil disagreements: you are safer in disagreement with a martial artist on civil grounds than you are with nearly anyone else save clergy of the majority of Christianity.

The concept of self-defense, however, goes beyond just humans gone lawless or turned lawbreaker, and includes all of Nature in that category of 'potential threat'. Animals are one thing, but knowing the 'lay of the land' another, and the greatest way to defend yourself is to avoid confrontations that can be easily avoided. Nature does not 'have it in for you' nor is it looking to protect you: Nature doesn't care about you and you are on your own when in the confines of the Natural world, which is all of your life. Nature tells you many things in the landscape, itself. Do you have a nice, raising meadow area between two forested areas, all of which go uphill rather quickly? If so, just why are there no trees in that meadow all the way up to the upper reaches of that summit? If you see snapped off trees at the edges or large piles of dirt, stone and random natural detritus further down, you may have found yourself an avalanche area or landslide area, not the place to be when it rains or snows a lot. Likewise do you find a stream with abnormally wide and clear banks and see that trees do not go down past a certain point on both sides of the stream valley? Then you can see where large flash floods come through, and as you never know what the weather is 30 miles from you upstream, it is best not to stay there overlong. Mother Nature doesn't care about you, but the message is clear: these are dangerous places at certain times.

Cheap Knowledge

Knowing edible plant life, while in season, is a great survival enhancement and when out of season an essential way to maintain a balance of nutrients and vitamins. You do not need to lug around a huge wildlife guidebook, just some of the convenient decks of cards put out for that purpose: they pack small and are lightweight, and you can use the ones you know for starting fires. Always handy! That, too, is self-defense: eating properly over time. For a short period of time that doesn't matter, but as this series of articles uses the James Burke question of what happens if the lights go out for good, the longer range of survival must intrude on preparations. A 50 cent or $1 pack of cards purchased now may ensure your long term survival later. That is damned cheap insurance, in my book.

Cheap Tools

To get at such plant life you do need a way to render it into edible form. This doesn't start with cooking but with taking non-edible portions away from edible ones so that you lower cooking time. The very first and most useful invention of mankind, still existing with us to this very day, are knives. Originally flint chips used to scrape and cut, the modern knife is a wonder of metallurgy and has thousands of years of good sense behind it. As a category knives go from swords and spear points (of large and numerous variety) to the simple pen knife. Every stout warrior of the Middle Ages carried the utility knife with them: a blade of less than 5" and no less than 2" with them at all times. A modern Swiss Army Knife at 2.25" fits into this category as does a variety of 'fighting knives' and 'commando knives' all the way up to such things as daggers and stilettos. The utility pocket or pen knife of 2 or more blades is a basic and essential part of any survival kit, be it in an actual knife form or in a 'multi-tool' that is pliers, corkscrew, flashlight... Why 2 blades? You will break one. Murphy works with Nature, and that means you need a back-up. The broken one can be fitted to a long stick as a digging tool or simple spear! Yes, when Murphy breaks your knife you now have the opportunity to fashion a makeshift spear/digging tool. Isn't that marvelous? A cheap pocket knife with two blades can be had for $10 and should, with care, last a lifetime. I have two pocket knives from my father and one, if memory serves, bought by my grand-father for my father... that one has a broken blade... and if you add in a cheap hand sharpener and honing oil you are looking at possibly $5 and a few minutes of work to get the blades back into shape.

Thus for a $1 pack of cards on edible plants, a cheap $10 knife and $5 in maintenance supplies for the short term (<1 year), you now have a survival sub-set of identification capability and tools to do basic scavenging in the long term (>5 years), just so long as you take care of them in the mid-term (1-5 years). Your survival cost is: $16 on the cheap.

What a pocket knife/pen knife/multi-tool does, is allow you to become a tool maker.

The prime definition of mankind is that we make tools to make tools to make tools to make things we use. Many animals make tools: birds do, chimpanzees do, and rodents do (after a fashion). Making a tool to make a tool is limited, as far as I know, to the hominids. At third degree there is only humanity. Using a knife to strip bark and put points on sticks means that you will not be wearing down the knife digging, but saving it to make more tools. The tools you make can go into making traps, snares and fishing weirs, or towards creating other tools to do more complex tasks. Without a knife you are down to flint knapping, which is a damned useful skill as it will save your knife from being over-used... by the time you have gotten to making hammers, wooden wedges, and primitive chisels, you will not be using your knife very much at all.

Longer fixed blades, as opposed to folding blades which I put into the 'utility knife' category, are useful for fewer tasks and more readily used for self-defense against animals. A fixed blade at an end of a straight stick is a spear used to fend off animals. Really, do you want to do that up close and personal with, say, a black bear? Or a bull moose during rutting season? Although, come to think of it, that last will not really care if it is pricked with a spear... best give those a wide berth. Of course making a fire hardened tip out of wood is better, still, and saves your machined and tooled blade. With that said a cheap machete is under $20, and I have seen some very cheap, if not too trustworthy, blades at under $15.

Total survival cost to you: $36, tax and tip not included.

With these most basic of tools you can now cut down small trees, brush, make spear points, gut fish and game, and do the million and one things that your hands and fingernails aren't good at doing. You would have a hard time packing all of that into a purse but with care that can be done. Or put into a small bag or pack and kept near you, although on your person is far, far better survival-wise. There are other tools to be had on the cheap, especially in multi-tools, but for the most basic set of survival requirements you are set at the sub-$50 range unless you buy very well made goods. Something that is better made should last longer, with care, than its cheaper alternative and it is up to you if this is truly 'last ditch if I have to survive' or 'without this I will die' mentality.

I will skirt the area of steel traps, dead-falls and the like as they are the realm of decent knowledge on animal habitats, skilled making of impromptu equipment and being able to figure out the first so as to use the second. This is the realm of Les Stroud and Bear Grylls.

Defense from the Elements

Self-defense from the elements is a common sense thing: tarps, rain ponchos that can be made into tents, clothesline, cords, etc. All of that can be under $10, on the cheap, too, for yourself.

Each person that needs to survive with you needs equipment, too, so that $36 basic is per person. Defense from the elements is per group. Do note that most military surplus rain ponchos can be sealed up to provide fast tent space with lines or cords, so that anyone with a friend needs enough cordage in case of sudden bad weather. I have seen surplus military rain ponchos on sale at less than $4 each in packs of three. Cordage varies, but 50' lengths of nylon can come in under $2 and often far less when bought in 100 yard lengths. A tarp to go under an ersatz tent would be more expensive, up to $10 although I have seen them for $4 at local closeout stores, and another rain poncho can serve on the fly, also. A thick 'solar blanket' with strong backing, usually canvas or other material, can be found under $10 each.

If this is not to your liking, then an 'emergency tent' in blaze orange can be had for $4-$10 and comes with cord but without a tarp, allowing it to pack very tightly. That said it is not as thick as a rain poncho and less handy against the wind and the cold. This may do if you are surviving solo, as that and a poncho can pack into a very small sack or waist pack.

Emergency shelter, then, can go for as low as $8 (low cost tent and poncho) or just a bit more per person ditching the emergency tent for ponchos and cord so that just under $15 can serve two people and that increment can be brought down with more individuals.

Your total cost is now: $44, shipping and tax not included.

Emergency Cooking

Cooking food is a matter of fire and ensuring you can have one in an emergency. For the long term people who survive the short term should have the skills to make fire, and in an emergency that must be instant without much skill. Folding solid fuel stoves (Esbit, et. al.) that can accept a wide range of solid or gel fluids are cheap (I've found them for under $10 for the stove, used, and about $10 for a package of fuel tabs). This is about as small as you can get as such things as a 'Commando Stove' or 'Pocket Grill' actually take up more space than this WWII German designed soldier's emergency stove. All the emergency stoves can take solid or gel fuels, so if you find the cost of the solids prohibitive, you can go with a cheaper gel (cost varies for solids from 80 cents per tablet and gels about 30 cents per package, although the tablet will last longer and heat more intensely). Thus your cost will vary somewhat depending on expected length of time you will need them. Either gel or tablet can be used in very small quantities to start fires with tinder, thus extending the use of such materials to cover more situations.

Cost for simple, basic stove and easy to pack refill on fuel: $20.

Total cost for simple survival: $64, although with the various provisos given on equipment quality, tax and shipping.

For absolute and positive emergencies, a 2" rod of flint plus your knife gets sparks, leaving you with something to catch the sparks that will catch fire rain or shine. The best tip I have for that is a pre-preparation DIY and involves having a big bag of cotton balls (actual, real cotton), petroleum jelly, and decent size sealable containers like old medicine bottles. The cost of this shouldn't run more than $5 unless you need to buy containers. The process is to smear a cotton ball completely in petroleum jelly and pack them into the sealable containers that will not leak petroleum jelly once it gets warm (like in a pack during a sunny day). With this cheap stuff you now have lots of prepared spark catching balls that have fuel and wick embedded in them, so should last long enough to add real tinder on them. Flint can cost you 50 cents per piece, so get a couple.

You are now around $70 for survival supplies, excepting those things that deal with the elements but adding in the one tool that makes us superior to the animals, which is fire use.

Defending yourself from more than the Elements

With the low end of self-defense taken care of (your self, tools, fire and the means to get them, we now head up into the higher cost range of self-defense, which is firearms. Mind you, if you are a boyer and fletcher, or a skilled atlatl craftsman, you already have the tools you need to survive, but most people don't. I heartily recommend spear tips (both solid and tines, especially frog gigging ends) for self-defense and small game as you only need a relatively straight branch and twine/cord to keep it on. Throw in a cheap mop handle that you can disassemble and for under $15 you have hand hefted self-defense at close to short range! A real bargain, that. But everyone concentrates on firearms and they are a flexible tool system if you have the right parts of the system, so I will start at the very basic, anyone can pick it up end of things.

As I said, this section gets expensive, quickly, but pre-made and useful tools and weapons come with the cost of having them made added into them. If you think about your needs now, then shopping for a decent bargain means you will find yourself with a slightly lower marginal cost, but at a slightly higher cost than the basics. I consider a single lightweight spear for fishing or frog work, and putting pointy things in the face of an animal to be very basic survival.

Cost for this section: $15.

Total cost: $85

From here, onwards, I will be discussing more expensive considerations. If you do not consider firearms and their use to be of necessity to you, then you have read as much as you are likely to need for survival.

Outside of the never so trusty 'saturday night special' guns made of zinc and likely to blow up in your hand, there is the rock bottom of firearms that is legal to have without any sort of proscription. Most folks don't consider them 'firearms', in the sense of Dirty Harry, but they are just that by definition and much more than that and have a multi-role place in a serious survival/rescue toolkit. Beyond that they are also useful for the longer-term, although they become 'last ditch' weapons. What is this category?

Flare guns.

Not the cheap plastic Orion ones! What I am talking about are military grade flare guns, which range across a gamut of sizes and eras, so even an 'antique' flare gun can serve you well if you think ahead to get the right parts for it. That said I will stick with the modern 26.5mm surplus guns common from the Eastern Bloc and West Germany, that can range from as low as $30 used to just over $50 new, old stock. Something like the HKP2A1, from Hechler & Koch:

Bobba Fett's favorite!

That is a one-shot, tip-up loaded flare gun. The cost of the flares for it are as much as the gun, per box of 10 flares, but a good part of that due to HAZMAT shipping, so buy a few boxes to bring the overall cost down. Yes there are cheaper flare guns on the market from Poland, Russia and the Czech Republic. I trust H&K. This is one simple, rugged design that you can clean with an old toothbrush and just a touch of light oil (I recommend Militec-1, but everyone has their own preferences). It is a solid foundation to work with. If memory serves it was made for a service life of 10,000 flare rounds and it is built to last with very little complicated on it.

Now for that 26.5mm flare gun you can also get a $15 adapter to 12 gauge flare rounds (not 12 gauge shotgun rounds, and don't try that with the insert!) and those 12 gauge flares you can find cheap, save for the HAZMAT fee. For aerial flare signaling the only thing better are single shot, purpose built high altitude flares that are for extreme distress maritime use and cost you, per shot, what this flare gun costs you. If not more. To make up for that you can get parachute flares (new, old stock) and other flares at 26.5mm and lesser altitude 12 ga. flares. As with all things survival, multipurpose and multi-capable is the idea here.

Flares are a burning pyrotechnic that are lightweight and have the extreme advantage of burning in nearly any weather. Get a large pile of logs with tinder in the center and an opening to fire into and the flare will happily burn anything on the inside of that pile. Make sure that you are in a decent clearing at a bit of distance, first, and that the flare can't shoot out through the other side. So for the price of gun plus flares you get a signaling device that can be seen at long distances and an ersatz emergency fire starting system (and a damned expensive one, too).

As you have guessed this is a serious piece of ordnance for survival, coming in at $50 for the gun and perhaps as much as $150 for three boxes of 26.5mm flares and one 12 ga. flare insert. This is a 'weigh and balance' concept: if you can't afford this, but can afford somewhat better initial gear (say a low cost ALICE pack for $30) then get the pack. Even if you can afford this, it is a step into an area that you may not be familiar with. If you are facing the unknown, then that is a choice you will make before disaster strikes, as you can't make it afterwards. However, I will go on to examine some other things this device is useful for to examine what that $200 gets you.

Section cost: $215.

Total cost: $285.

There are only a couple of 'alternate' rounds at 12 ga. for this platform and the best of those is the pepper gas/spray rounds made for flare guns (as opposed to 12 ga. shotgun rounds). That can be a life saver against large carnivores if you have nothing else (thus last ditch) or useful fired into an enclosed space like a room or car. Stand upwind of it if you ever have to use it. I have seen a three pack of these rounds for under $10.

Flares for 12 ga. flare guns do range a bit in price, but specialty pyrotechnics places sell them for $15 per 9 rounds. Orion flares can be used in such an insert, and I've seen those at the low end of $25 for 4 rounds.

So for simple self-defense rounds and a pack of 9 rounds of red/green flares, your cost is: $25.

Section Cost: $315.

Total cost: $340

For carrying around purposes, you can carry at least 3 of the 12 gauge rounds for every 1 of the 26.5mm rounds. The latter go about 3x higher than the former, so you are trading off number of rounds for vertical distance. Three very low altitude rounds don't matter if you are in a deep canyon as they won't clear the walls of it, thus you must take terrain into consideration for your expected survival needs.

At $225 you now have a variable altitude signal device, plus one that can do pepper spray to incapacitate a good sized room or convince a hungry carnivore that they really do not want to mess with you. Throw in an old Russian satchel made for 26.5mm flare guns and you add another $10 to the expenses, but I will keep that out for estimation purposes.

In the realm of inserts there is one man who makes a double insert system to adapt the 26.5mm gun to various pistol rounds. The idea is that each steel insert will take the pressure before it gets to the gun, itself. Once you get that and insert those into a flare gun you have created a deadly weapon, a true handgun, albeit single shot. This has been done in the maritime realm so as not to have a 'real' gun for those ports that don't allow them but to still have some sort of defense in the bridge. So long as the inserts are not inserted, you have a flare gun. This is not a toy, and your life is in your hands with that, which is the point of things. The ability of the frame of a well made flare gun to take firing even small pistol rounds is suspect, but if your life is on the line this is better than nothing. Cost for the double insert is a bit over $100.

I don't consider that as 'essential' unless you are thinking of 'last ditch' sorts of equipment or foresee your maritime travels going into areas where Pirates and other lawless people roam. At that point upgrading your foreseeable problems means weighing costs and benefits of such inserts. As it is I will not use the purpose built inserts for cost estimation, but examine another area that covers the same ground in the way of inserts.

Next up on inserts is a bit harder and requires just a bit of time and energy. The main problem with the straight adapter for 26.5mm to 12 ga. flare rounds is that it is chambered for flare rounds (short shotgun rounds) and isn't all that sturdy. To get to firing pistol rounds requires a multi-insert system, but if you are considering a wide range of possible survival settings and can afford inserts and pistol rounds, then you want something convertible to common 12 ga. for standard 12 ga. shotgun inserts for pistol rounds. The great wonder is that the 26.5mm flare gun is almost, but not quite, 4 gauge shotgun in size. For display cannons there is a 4 ga. to 10 ga. adapter, but it is just a bit too big to fit. So you would have to sand or grind it down just a bit to get a good fit and if you are handy with a dremel and have some good bits for attacking aluminum, you are looking at a couple hours of work to pare down the outer diameter and the base of the insert. Cost for this insert runs about $40, your time in grinding not included but makes for an interesting spare time project.

Why 10 gauge shotgun, which is a larger diameter than 12 gauge? At 10 ga. shotgun you can get a 10 ga. to 12 ga. shotgun adapter, but since the 4 to 10 insert is lightweight you wouldn't trust your hand with that idea: you like your hand, it likes you and you will not blow it off using a 12 ga. shotgun round. However, at that point you are now in a standard and relatively cheap market for (<$20) pistol inserts for 12 ga. That 4 to 10 insert is a bit steep to get you to something a bit more common and from 10 to 12 is no picnic ($30 or so). At that point you have 3 inserts to take the pressure of the pistol round 4-10, 10-12, 12-pistol. So you have a steel flare gun, aluminum 4 to 10 insert, and then two steel inserts (10 to 12ga and then 12ga. to pistol round of your choice) all of which should take the expansion of the pistol rounds used. For $80 or so, and some work on your part, you go from a flare gun to a deadly weapon able to take much smaller caliber rounds.

Do remember that this is not a nice firearm designed to fire these things! It isn't made to take a lot of punishment and you are the recoil mechanism. That is why this is 'last ditch' and far more expensive than a dedicated single shot shotgun. A shotgun, however, isn't that easy to carry around and is limited to the lower altitude 12 ga. flares, so your decision must be made on what the purpose of the firearm is and how it is to be made available to you in an emergency. A flare gun is a low-end, all-purpose tool for signaling, emergency fire starting and self-defense, but with limitations on the last. Any time it was used in that 'last ditch' role, and you survive, the entire firearm should be examined for cracks or expansion on the barrel, plus the inserts may have expanded to the point where you can't get them out of the gun. Making that call of having an all-purpose 'by god if I have nothing else with me, I will at least have this' gun against the ready-made 'bug out' kits by Smith & Wesson or Mossberg is one of choice, utility and expectation of events. You can do a lot with a dedicated 12 gauge shotgun and it can do things the all-purpose, lightweight flare gun can't. But the flare gun can do things the shotgun can't, too.

You can have the capability to do these things and never use them.

But if you ever need them and don't have them, you are SOL.

Defending yourself from the elements, providing shelter and food is low cost. When you step up in the level of considerations of what might happen to you, your expectations must adapt to that wider range of possibilities. As actual firearms vary widely in cost and personal needs, I can only ballpark a few things and examine what I have looked at.

Defending yourself and hunting, basic firearms and concepts

Beyond the basics you get to the dedicated (or insert adaptable) area of rifles, shotguns and pistols. Each have their pluses and minuses, they all require you to train yourself in being able to fire them, use them, clean them and think about them not just as weapons but as survival tools. Each realm is open to a wide range of individual tastes, attitudes and capabilities, but for general categorization they come down to ranges: short (up to 10 yards), medium (10 to 100 yards), long (100 yards+). Each area can be used in the others, to a degree, and a rifle is relatively handy all the way up to personal space defense weapon where the ability to quickly change targets is critical.

I can't offer you solid choices on these, just some that I have made for myself and the reasons why.

At long range the Mosin-Nagant line of Russian/Soviet/East Bloc bolt action rifles is my preference as they were designed for Russian peasants in the 1880's to use. If you have the ability to find the instructions and strip the bolt down using a purpose designed tool, cleaning and oiling the thing, then you have a dependable firearm. It was not made for the space age and is a 'no frills' rifle that is very basic in design, care and maintenance. The Finns bought them on the cheap, did some testing for accuracy and their version, based on the Soviet sent arms, allowed the much smaller Finnish Army to beat the Soviet Army during the winter war. A top sniper for the Finns was a farmer, and he used a Finn Mosin-Nagant and was a terror to the Soviets in that sector. Chambered in 7.62 x54R (Rimmed or Russian, but 54R is critical), this is the oldest '3 line' rifle round still in use today. The Eastern Bloc and Soviet military surplus ammo is cheap, but corrosively primed so you need to clean anything that touches the exhaust gases that is metal after use. There is a water based CLP available (Gunzilla), Aero-Kroil, and even a DIY mixture of Murphy's Oil Soap/Isopropyl Alcohol/Hydrogen Peroxide, plus quickly getting a patch or 10 through until you get the stuff out of the system. Or you can use water which dissolves the salts but really needs to be cleaned out so the thing doesn't rust.

These are cheap, reliable rifles and have cheap ammo available, plus a real confidence builder once you get something on the buttstock to help with the recoil or wear thick clothing. The major downsides are that the military surplus coming from Russia/Poland/Czech Republic/Bulgaria rifles are in cosmoline and will always have some come out when you fire them, unless you totally redo the stock. The upper forearms need some small pieces of material to help keep them in place, too, and original arms were found with paper stuck there, but I recommend very thin, cut with a scissors, brass shim stock. These weapons were made for Russian winters, summers, and soldiers who didn't take good care of them, which sounds like survival conditions to me!

Personal choice only, remember, and this is for survival, not fighting off the zombie hordes.

There are very few 'exotic' rounds for the 7.62 x54R, and they tend to be either tracer or incendiary. Thus, as a round, it isn't all that useful beyond moderate size game hunting and not adaptable to multiple situations.

I have seen used Mosin-Nagants for $80, arsenal packed in cosmoline from a 1950's check-over for $90-$120, and lovely Finnish rifles for $350 on up. Sniper versions cost much, much more. Ammo in a 'spam can' from Bulgaria can be had at 440 rounds for under $90. Modern non-corrosively primed I can find 20 rounds for $10. Bulk discounts can be found for the ammo, still, even with the various runs on other ammo this last year.

For under $200 you get a basic rifle, a spam can of ammo, plus a buttstock pad, and the joy of wiping cosmoline off the forearm and putting small strips of brass in to keep the upper handguard from sliding around.

Next up, shotguns.

Shotguns have one name to know: John Moses Browning.

From 1903 to 1999 the Browning Auto-5 sold continuously and there are millions of them out there. Likewise the various pump shotguns of Browning are still beloved of hunters and troopers to this day. From what I have heard the basic system of exchange in the back country of TN is 'The Browning' as those shotguns are a steady game-getter, easy to maintain and a necessary part of living.

No matter what the shotgun is that you want for survival, the idea is that this would be a primary multi-use gun at 12 gauge. As we have seen before there are 12 ga. flares and 12 ga. pepper rounds. In fact 12 ga. is the realm of exotic ammo from frangible copper slugs made to blow hinges off of doors to tear gas 'rockets' that are actually just finned delivery capsules. From blanks that go 'bang' to flechettes to flares to tear gas to 'less than lethal' flexible baton (bean bag) rounds... if someone ever said 'hey, can this be made into a 12 gauge round?' then it probably has been. For everything from high velocity sabot rounds to slugs to buckshot to bird shot to bolos to nails to salt to pepper... the reason that this is a survival weapon is that it is all-purpose gun, no matter if you have a single shot, side by side, over/under, pump or semi-auto in 12 ga., you have a full suite of options from 'less than lethal' to riot control to small game to big game to signaling all with one gun. If you can't justify a flare gun as a multi-purpose survival tool, then a 12 gauge shotgun is the gun of choice.

Make sure the barrel is smoothbore for as rifling really messes with exotic ammo and skews shot like you wouldn't believe.

If you pick up an antique, get it checked by a gunsmith to make sure it is sound and will work with modern rounds and their pressures.

I prefer a Browning Auto-5 with slug barrel that is Cylinder (no choke). Luckily the original barrel was a Cutts compensated full choke and the barrels are easy to swap out (just remember to change the ring positions!), so for under $500 I have an adaptable shotgun. The hunting and target rounds are damned cheap for 12 ga. and the exotic stuff can be anything from cheap (25 cents/shot for small game shot shells) to 'you want HOW MUCH for 3 rounds?' (getting into the $8+ per shot range). If you use it for home defense remember the ranges on 'less than lethal' and pay attention to where you really shouldn't hit. Plus it shows you though ahead of time and don't intend to kill. What this means is that a 12 ga. shotgun is the all-purpose firearm... save for the long barrel and weight of it. If it wasn't an Auto-5 I would have been looking at a pump action Browning.

A new Mossberg pump action can be had for under $400 (check to see if the survival kit is available), a used Browning Auto-5 with two swappable barrels for $500, and a Kimberly Safari Shotgun with gold scrollwork easily gets into the $10,000 range and up... way up. That old thing at the back of the antique store may only be $100, and once you pay a gunsmith to check it out, you probably dropped another $30-50, and you might have a 'wall hanger' that you will disable and cherish as the new family heirloom or a survival shotgun. With more modern weapons, like the Mossberg 500 pump action, you can get into all sorts of tactical arrangements, home defense set-ups and still have a decent hunting weapon.

My choice was a basic late 1940's vintage Browning Auto-5 that had a barrel for competition/small game and then a later Japanese steel barrel for solid shot, buckshot, and home defense needs. A semi-auto tends to raise the barrel up due to recoil more than a pump action, which is great for quail on the wing but not so hot for the zombie hordes.

Pistols run such a wide gamut it isn't funny, but keep in mind your ultimate needs when deciding if and what you need. Getting a concealed carry weapon (plus any legal documents to allow you to do that legally via training and such) is one thing. A pistol for survival needs is another. There are two calibers that are personally suited to my needs, yours will vary.

First is .22lr, which is a rimfire cartridge and suitable for small game and has been used for decades for just that purpose. Rifles for .22lr are very lightweight, compared to the Mosin-Nagant, and far better for small game at close range, so as a survival rifle (pure and simple) a Marlin 60, Ruger 10/22, Ruger Charger or, really, just about anything would do well for the close range/small game set-up. On the pistol side there are the Browning Buckmarks, the Ruger Mark series, plus the Baretta NEOS, amongst tens if not hundreds of designs, possibly thousands once you get back 70 years or so. A small game hunting pistol in .22lr should have a long barrel to it for better rifling effect and be a bit thicker than a self-defense barrel. A heavier barrel means fewer changes due to thermal expansion as you fire, thus allowing for greater accuracy. What you get is up to you, and if this is to be a CCW then a short barrel and slim-line design (like those from North American Arms) may be more your style.

The thing that must be done with any pistol, shotgun or rifle: practice, practice, practice. Practice on the range. Practice holding it at home in your copious spare time. Practice dry firing. Practice your stance. All of these are critical with a .22lr as it is a small round and the slightest movement by you is the difference between hitting what you are aiming at and missing it completely, and the smaller the target, the smaller the error on your part that will do that. Your survival depends on your skill.

As a survival round .22 lr is actually pretty good. There are shotshells for 'pest control' that won't go through things like aluminum siding, but are good against snakes and other very small animals. There are also tracer and incendiaries available of various types, plus a wide degree of pre-fragmented, sectional and other forms of projectile, that make the .22lr a prime survival round. For survival and getting small game .22lr is a pretty good round type and for long term survival a competent marksman can make a limited ammo supply go a long, long way at a very low up front cost. A Marlin 60 can be found for under $150 and a Ruger Mark III Competition pistol for under $400. Out of the box and with a good cleaning to get the factory gunk out of them, they are good survival weapons. The US Air Force has used a single shot .22lr as its bail-out gun for pilots since the 1960's as it is low mass, low cost and very accurate, plus isn't that noisy in the field. There is a good chance that someone within a mile will hear a 12 gauge shotgun blast, but very little they will hear a .22lr especially if it is a sub-sonic load. Cost for 500 rounds of .22lr is normally under $25 and often under $20. That is a 'brick' of ammo and weighs about the same as 30 rounds of 7.62 x54R or 25 rounds of 12 gauge birdshot shells.

I'm really quite surprised that no manufacturer has made a good 'bug out bag' based on a .22lr pistol.

Second for caliber is 45 ACP, the most favorite round for American pistols and even a few carbines. The Browning designed Colt 1911 has been a favorite on and off the battlefield since it was introduced and, when all the variants are taken into account, outsells any other handgun in the US, hands-down. With the run on ammo starting after the election of 2008, 45 ACP vanished off the shelves in a few weeks and the first wave of re-supply in AUG 2009 also quickly went down. Now there is enough to purchase without paying a premium and it goes back into the 'a good round to have' category. As a round the 45 ACP hits a 'sweet spot' between speed and mass, remaining sub-sonic in most loads and yet delivering a heavy system shock. The arguments on this are legion! Still 'In Browning We Trust' should be a motto for a coin. Here I varied from my recommendation of a 1911 variant for myself, as I didn't have a shotgun or rifle, at the time, and didn't know when I would have money for either, but the 1911 is what I recommend as there is not a gun shop in the US that hasn't seen a few dozen of them if not a hundred or more. A good 1911 variant is on my 'buy list' if I ever have funds for one again.

Surprisingly this is a survival round having a wide array of ammo types available for it: flare rounds (they won't cycle a semi-auto), shotshell, tracer, incendiary, explosive, 'spotter' that lights up on impact, frangible (lethal but doesn't over penetrate), segmented, and on and on. I picked up a longer barrel pistol version of the Kahr/Auto-Ordnance Thompson TA5 as its 10.5" barrel allowed for the most velocity as a standard load has expended its powder completely in that distance. That meant a general all purpose firearm that did none of the things specialized ones did (as a shotgun it isn't much, as a rifle it doesn't have enough range, as a pistol its too bulky) but did them all passably with a bit of style. I would not want it as a carry weapon as it isn't concealable nor lightweight.

But then most pistols can't use a 50 or 100 round drum magazine, either.

I had some work done on mine to allow it to use the older Auto-Ordnance and Government Issue magazines of 20 and 30 rounds. I refuse to mutilate pieces of history when I can perfectly well mutilate something modern with a good spare parts supply. The up-front expense for the Thompson has more than made up for the actual using it, and it has proven to be quite accurate with a smoothbore barrel far beyond what I expect for a pistol. Its mass means it is a weight lifting session, but the joy of getting round on target in tight groupings more than makes up for that. Additionally it is 'user friendly' if you can heft it and have good, reliable magazines.

45 ACP target ammo goes for under $20 for a box of 50 rounds. The cost of a 1911 or variant, or any other pistol using the round, varies so much as not to be funny. As a separate platform I was looking at the $700-$800 range, although Kahr has some nice slim-line variants for under $400. And that is on the new market... used I would prefer a historical arm, not necessarily war time issue, as I do have a fondness for historical arms.

Out of the list the cheapest to outfit is the Mosin-Nagant. For about $100 you can still get a great, clean bore military surplus rifle. For an extra hundred you might get someone else to clean it for you... but if you are willing to expend the time and effort to get the cosmoline off, then you have an inexpensive, relatively accurate rifle. Get up to the $350 range and you can get a Finnish surplus one, no cleaning necessary. The ammo is 20-25 cents per round in bulk 'spam can' amounts (440 rounds per can). A real deal for the cost and you get a piece of history, as well. It is the cheapest to procure and the second cheapest to actually use on a per round basis.

Next is the .22lr and a single pistol comes in well under $400 and a Marlin 60 rifle comes in under $150, and ammo is damned cheap (although during the ammo run of 2009 it was also absent, but so was 45 ACP and .22lr came back first). At 4 to 6 cents per round you can't go wrong, and buying in bulk can lower that price, too. Exotics cost more, of course. This is the second cheapest to procure, and the cheapest to fire on a per round basis.

For shotguns you can vary from $150 to... well what are those gold engraved, specialized pieces? Still at the survival end cost for the gun itself, $500 to $700 with a pretty wide variance at the low end, depending on your personal needs and ability. Cost per round is 25 cents to a dollar (from target shot to slugs) and more for a sabot and exotic ammo. It is a real investment useful for a wide range of applications and nothing can replace a good 12 ga. shotgun, and if you must have one gun, and only one gun, make it a 12 gauge shotgun. What you can do with it has no peer in diversity for a weapons platform.

The 1911 variants and older models range all over the map, but rarely under $500 for an older service weapon, although that is only a ballpark. A special-made custom with all sorts of goodies can reach $2,700 and beyond, and in-between at the $700-$900 range are good modern models. Cost for ammo is 36 to 45 cents or so per round at the low end with exotics cost more at the high round. Remember I paid more for something different.

Are these all the guns I have?

No, these are my survival ones that I consider to be good, multi-use weapons.

I do not consider myself to be a 'gun nut' nor someone who has a deep knowledge and history of firearms per model, per line and per type. I do like the history of arms and have the capability to take decent care of the mechanical end of things while being a pretty fair shot. And while I do work up a sweat at the range, the need to concentrate and understand what I am doing is, itself, a form of relaxation and honing a skill.

Next up on my list of skills to acquire: sewing.

Is it just me or has there been a run on jeans needles, lately?

Why sewing?

I have an article I'm working on... about backpacks. Really the entire industry has undergone a revolution over the last 30 years. But adapting your equipment to YOU is a PITA. Thus I am off to the world of cloth, thread, needles, foam, ALICE, MOLLE and weight distribution. And the last time I even touched a sewing machine I was around 8 or so. Luckily I only need 'the basics'.

Just like firearms.

And I have this lovely White Model 565 from the 1960's...

Terror, terrorism and Ft. Hood

2009-11-07T09:56:00.001-05:00

To the family and loved ones of those that have died in the recent tragedy at Ft. Hood you have my deepest condolences and sympathy for your sudden loss. My words cannot express my feelings adequately.

To those that have been wounded in this attack, you also have my sympathy and my regard for surviving such an attack. Many of your comrades around you were not wounded because of you just as the fallen have died in place of another so you, too, have received the sharp end of the unexpected. My deepest regards to you, your families and loved ones, and I wish you a speedy recovery.

To Police Sergeant Kimberly Munley: thank you for your courage and cool under fire while wounded. You have saved many lives by your action and that of your fellow officers to end this tragedy and ensure that it would end. My best and dearest wishes for a speedy recovery from your wounds and return to health.

Any act in which an individual reclaims their negative liberty of warfare, to act as an animal, is one that is of pure terror as it is the loss of civilized controls upon the self and a return to the state of an animal. It does not matter if it is a calculated dropping of such restraints or pure blinding animal impulse overwhelming the individual: the source of such reclaiming does not change the event, itself, save when those dropping the restraints of civilization act together without cause. Those that commit such acts do not deserve our pity nor our attempts to exculpate them by blaming such an uncivilized act on conditions. Guilt or innocence is for a jury to decide, and then source and reason indicates level of punishment. The presumption for any charged is innocence and proof must be beyond a reasonable doubt of a jury. Juries can get it wrong, yes. Trying an individual in the court of public opinion guarantees a wrong verdict as our media play up to emotions, not facts, and thus misguide our thinking via intent through lack of content. That is why we have juries: to avoid emotional based conviction or decree of innocence as neither weighs the facts.

During my time working on the civil side of DoD, I visited many bases and facilities fully under military control. The level of self-control and civility was and is astonishing and when any individual within the armed forces reverts to their animal nature it is a double pity as such an individual not only became uncivilized but betrayed the trust of their comrades in arms who depend upon them. As we depend upon them to defend our Nation, this is the highest form of loss we can suffer as it erodes the trust within the very organization we use to keep us safe. No higher loss of trust can be found, save for treason, and when plotted with malice aforethought and intent to change the course of a Nation through one's actions, then the act, itself, is treason as well as reclaiming one's negative liberty of Private War.

Those individuals who step forward to learn the trade of arms do just that: learn the trade of arms. We ensure that they get the highest level of training not only in the arms but in themselves so that they come to understand themselves and their place in our common defense. These individuals are trained in more than just arms, but in treatment of wounds, first aid and many other areas that allow them to survive the harshest conditions that humanity offers them, which is the battlefield. The battlefield is that place where civilization falls apart most directly, and yet we try to place civilized rules so as to keep the carnage and atrocities down. Our soldiers are taught to uphold civilization not where it is easy and comfortable, in their homes and offices, but where it is least likely to be upheld which is that chaotic field of battle. That training is done to help distinguish between those that are uncivilized and need to be stopped, and those that are civilized and need to be protected. Due to the chaotic nature of the battlefield this is never easy, and such laws of war have come about so that the innocent are not destroyed by the nature of war, itself.

When on such bases I never wondered if soldiers were kind, courteous and competent. They were US soldiers.

Even on the most open of bases and facilities before 9/11 I did wonder about the lack of even side arms for self-protection. As we have come to understand Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, we have come to learn that normalizing of the mind takes many forms and soldiers now employ those forms from immediate de-compression via violent video games to meditation and counseling. Thus I had no worries about soldiers who had been in Somalia, Bosnia, Kosovo, Colombia, Philippines, and elsewhere being in harms way. We have changed how we deal with the aftermath of battle upon the minds of our soldiers, and in many ways we now come to understand the more ritualized techniques of primitives and those before modern times that required similar forms of purification, understanding and re-acclimating themselves to civil society after the horrors of warfare. They are far better prepared to identify danger and how to respond to lethal threats and even the non-lethal sort that involve warfare than any police officer can be. While both see similar threats, the field of war goes far deeper into how a soldier will asses a lethal situation and respond. While they could not respond to stop the attacker at Ft. Hood, they served instantly to care for the fallen and stabilize the wounded and save lives immediately. There was no question of paperwork, training and instant reaction as that had all been done. Not all who were there were veterans, that is true, but the response between soldiers in different units points to a coherence of understanding that goes far deeper than any civil set of forces that require higher levels of coordination between them outside of the immediate realm. Soldiers responded to treat the wounded, secure the area, and ensure communications and supply lines for that is their job.

My question is simple: why are our citizen soldiers denied the right of self-protection due to any citizen of the United States?

They are citizens first.

Soldiers second.

We trust them to fight for us and correctly identify the enemy in the heat of battle and uphold the highest laws of warfare in doing so.

Why do we not trust them as citizens with the positive right of self-defense?

If our Armed Forces were remiss in identifying an individual with troubles, a person with deep personal misgivings of the armed forces and their mission, then that must be addressed, to be sure.

But to deny our citizens the right to protect themselves openly when they are trained in the highest morals and ethics of warfare to distinguish between minor events and lethal ones on the urban battlefield?

A soldier by taking up arms to protect our Nation is a target on and off the battlefield as they are openly stating their willingness to die for us. In uniform or out of it, they are targets of our enemies who wish to destroy our will to fight and our Nation. There is no safety when there are lack of arms as those who revert to their base, animal instincts will always and ever find a way to kill to assert their will over others.

That is the nature of man.

That negative liberty and right of asserting one's will over others also creates, simultaneously, the positive right and liberty for self-defense, to uphold one's existence and to assert the civil right to survive without being threatened by death by those wishing to control you. When taking that animal liberty against a citizen working with civil means, the positive liberty and right spring into being so that there is a higher authority to be invoked when man turned as animal against all mankind arises: yourself who will hold yourself accountable to civil laws for your actions.

Can we not entrust our soldiers to understand that at home, too?

They know the laws of war and the laws of peace and the differences between them.

If we, on the civil side, cannot make that distinction, then we are seeking to dissolve that compact which allows our society to flourish and inviting the law of nature to rule over us with no means to address it.

No good will ever come of that.

Emergency Government

2009-10-25T14:35:00.001-04:00

“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.” -H. L. Mencken (from Ralph Benko, from an addendum to a Mark Tapscott story at the Washington Examiner, found via Instapundit)

Yes we have yet another emergency, this the Swine Flu which was predicted months ago and the President promised that there would be enough vaccine for everyone, and from the folks who brought you:

"You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that is an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before." - Rahm Emanuel

That was when the entire economy was going to go poof overnight and we needed, desperately needed, the stimulus package to do something! Or perhaps it was the big, bad banks who were following federal regulations on lending and putting money out to borrowers who couldn't pay it back in housing and other areas that needed, oh, so needed, the TARP and rescue package because they were too big to fail! The auto companies were going down and they would be forced to go bankrupt and re-organize which would be awful because that would mean massive job loss and we just had to do something! And we have to have more lending in the housing market because that will collapse and the entire Nation will go to wrack and ruin , so we have to do something! And the stimulus has pushed unemployment far above the expectations of doing nothing that we now need, desperately need, a second stimulus package, because we just can't sit by and do nothing!

Meanwhile, those Nations that didn't go on a spending binge are out of their recessions, worried that the US will pull down the rest of the world market as we flush our economy down the drain with emergency spending, and wondering just why the hell we can't stop doing things and let the recovery take over. But those are the so very wise European governments that we are supposed to take our wisdom from... say, just why can't we follow their leads and let the economy recover and not try to tax and spend ourselves to oblivion and take much of the rest of the world economy with us? For all the grousing, moaning and complaining about how much of the world's resources the US uses, it is also a fact that we are a quarter of the world's economy, produce much more per capita than anyone else around, and the world depends on us to be sober in our spending habits.

Instead we have gotten a massive hit to our economy, massive job loss, a disorganized private sector because government now sees fit to invalidate contracts on whim, and tax money flowing out in a tidal wave that will cause massive structural debt, increased inflation, devalue the dollar, and bring instability to all those countries holding securities in the US who are seeing their investment in our way of life go poof!

Now here's the question on structural debt via Non-Performing Loans (NPLs).

I've heard the US is heading north on NPLs, which are loans 90 days past due and unlikely to ever be paid off. A large part of that is due to the new home market, which ripples through the economy to durable goods and consumer sectors. We brought that on ourselves by encouraging those who are economically marginal to actually get federally pushed loans via lenders and the FHA then packaged those up (along with Freddie and Fannie) and put the 'US Govt Safe' seal of approval on them, when the loans, themselves, were anything but safe. Now I'm going to start stealing some data from one of my previous articles to look at the NPL problems that have happened elsewhere:

NPL are Loans that are in default or close to being in default. And this International Journalists' Network article by Anya Schiffrin on the large role of NPLs in banking crises, points out that once a Nation gets over 9% NPL on all outstanding loans, it is starting to look at real trouble.

The role of NPLs in a Nation's economic structure cannot be over stated. At the time of writing that article, the US NPL was less than 2% with the majority of that being in consumer debt, not institutional or business debt, and the majority of that consumer debt in the NPL status was in credit cards.

Now a note of update on my article via a Business Insider 23 OCT 2009 article by Joe Weisenthal who references this Financial Times article by Arthur Kroeber on 06 OCT 2009:

So just how big is China’s NPL time-bomb? That is largely a function of economic growth rates.

Average annual nominal GDP growth of 11 per cent, 9 per cent and 7 per cent over the next decade would generate net fiscal NPL costs of 6 per cent, 7.2 per cent and 8.7 per cent of GDP respectively in 2019 – substantial, but not catastrophic.

There is no necessary reason why existing NPLs, even including bad loans arising from the 2009-2010 monetary stimulus, should threaten the viability of the system. In short, the calculated bet of letting NPLs shrivel through time and growth can safely be placed one more time.

But this bet absolutely cannot be placed a third time.

The above scenarios only work if the financial system generates no net new NPLs in 2011-2019 beyond the banks’ own ability to provision and write down.

China has been playing games with its debt by shuffling it around to different vehicles, and has done so since the 1990's. Twice China has shuffled its debt to different vehicles, and now the money is expecting to be paid out. China has a major problem: there is a global recession and many of its hardest cash holdings are in the US real estate market, via investing in Freddie and Fannie. The crony capitalist system, a form of national socialism, has allowed those in favor with the regime to build businesses, default on those loans when the businesses collapse and have that passed into debt vehicles approved of by the government. Any similarity to the passing on of bad housing debt via federally approved vehicles is purely intentional.

Plus for all the phenomenal growth rate China reports, the conservative estimate of having 30% of their economy underwritten by these loan vehicles, in other words 60% of their GDP depending on NPL loan swaps to different vehicles, is conservative because China under-reports the NPLs and over-estimates its growth. Market based estimates go up to 50% of the economy underwritten by NPL loan vehicles picking up the temporary tab for the bills of past failures. Those bills are coming due, US housing investments are tanking and China is in a bind.

So how are things going here? Well the FDIC Select Peer Group and Report Date for 30 JUN 2009 sees some disturbing trends on 06 and 06A:

Real Estate Loans in the non-accrual and 90+ days past due is up to 2.31% from 1.29% in 2008.

Commercial real estate is up to 0.11% in the same category, up from 0.01% in 2008.

Construction and land development up to 5.23% from 2.16% in 2008.

1-4 family homes 4.10% up from 1.89% in 2008.

Other construction and land development 5.45% up from 1.95% in 2008.

The longer trends on these are going from EOY to mid-Year cycle so that there is only 6 months between 2007 and 2008, but still interesting to note them (06/30/2009, 06/30/2008, 12/31/2007, 12/31/2006), again all for the NPL (non-accrual plus 90+ days past due):

Real Estate 2.31% 1.29% 1.76% 0.90% 0.57%

Commercial 0.11% 0.01% 0.03% 0.00% N/A

Const.         5.23% 2.16% 3.57% 1.05% 0.24%

1-4 Family    4.10% 1.89% 3.05% 1.34% N/A

Other           5.45% 1.95% 3.44% 1.18% N/A

We are just now getting the repercussions of the tanking of the real estate market in the NPL arena for housing. Construction can be seen as a leading indicator as it feels the pinch first when housing starts are put on hold or canceled, thus causing a rippling into that part of the industry. The last two interesting, indicating a cyclic market, but one that is increasing in its NPL area. All of this while the mortgage market is only slowly seeing its rates go up for the same category:

Non-Farm Mort/Residential 1.66% 0.81% 1.20% 0.61%

The category I'm not showing is the 30-89 days past due, which shows that some of the influence is from those loans, no doubt, slipping into the other categories or just having a delinquent set of payees who can get payments in but late on a continual basis. On 06A we get the final Gross line item for all loans and leases for the 06 section, and below that, in the totals, we get the full percent of all loans and leases past due including non-accrual for the entire banking industry that is overseen by the FDIC:

%Total P/D LN/LS 3.78% 2.45% 3.30% 2.20% 1.17%

This is a pretty good proxy stand-in for National NPL status, and the trendline from EOY 2006 to MID 2009 is up in all categories thus reflected in the total which is up by over double. Of particular note is that the 'housing crisis' starting by EOY 2007 had lessened, somewhat, by MID-2008, and this was reflected in all P/D loans in all categories. Thus the MID 2008 to MID 2009 jump is due to the intervening months as the market had been digesting the problems by EOY 2007. The multiple 'crises' times between those two reporting periods changed what had been an up and down, choppy trendline (in other words still increasing but with rapid market changes) to one that now flattens out to increasing at a much higher rate. If all the 'necessary' things to 'stabilize' the market had, indeed, actually stabilized the market, each of these trends would have flattened with minimal increase from the previous year. Even with the undigested loans in the market, those were being addressed by changing in lending practices and crunching those loans out of the system. This did cause some massive losses in big banks and all the money poured into those should have stabilized the market, but didn't do that.

So we are left at MID 2009 with NPLs going up towards 4%.

This is before all the 'stimulus' money gets into the pipeline, which is causing headaches on loans and lending as the projects that are being done do not address the structural problems of the market.

Additionally the Community Re-investment Act is getting re-upped, which is a major cause of the increasing home prices over time, due to easy money lending practices to those who can't afford such loans. That is causing structural debt problems in the market that need more than just cash infusion in them, and need a change in the regulations to allow normal repayment expectations to hold sway and get the federal 'help' in lending out of the system. Additionally the banks should be the ones to judge the ability of those credit vehicles that gather up such losses and put them on the market. As both Democrats and Republicans have voted to approve past revisions of the CRA to achieve these policies, there is no 'party' to whine about as being at fault: they are both idiots in this area.

Finally some of the instability is reflected in TARP, itself, with funds going unaccounted for and the market not knowing how the public will react to that. As the Federal Reserve pushed that vehicle forward, and Timothy Geithner was a prime mover at the end of the Bush Administration and continues on in the Obama Administration, his role in this is not to be underestimated, particularly in the lead-up to the 'necessary' bailouts.

So, if you really and truly believe that all the spending will actually make the government solvent AND help out the entire market for NPLs, then you need to address the structural components leading up to this problem, which has been in large part from the federal side, with crony lending institutions (FHA, Freddie and Fannie) plus willing (or coerced) banks facilitating these policies which date back to the Carter Administration and were puffed up during the Clinton Administration and Bush Administration. That is a bi-partisan problem and pissing about it being 'Bush's Fault' ignores the long standing structural problems both parties have willingly introduced into the lending arena. All of those extra regulations to 'help' people have now changed the path of the entire economy, and throwing good money after bad is putting us into a nasty position of not being able to have all that lovely outgo be covered by tax income. That then gets you inflation, as the Federal Reserve puts money into the system to cover those debts, thus reducing the value of the dollars currently held. And supporters must then address the economic growth problem in the US, as small businesses are not hiring people due to the instability in the market introduced by the federal government and more regulations and not letting the rule of law put companies into bankruptcy for restructuring, and those external holders of our debt that have a huge insolvent debt load that needs some hard cash income to try and keep their economy afloat.

Which is China.

If you cry, bitch and moan about Halliburton and its evility, then where is the crying, bitching and moaning about AIG, Merrill Lynch, Bank of America, GM, Chrysler, etc. that are holding this country hostage with federal help? If you complain about the petty overcharges by Halliburton, then why are you not complaining about the huge rip-off that is going on with these companies and the billions in TARP that are not being accounted for? Would it not be better to have these large companies go through bankruptcy restructuring, which they would all do, have their debt and valuation properly assessed and then get on with life as smaller, leaner companies that would then open up the market to new entrants? Or do you really like the idea that companies deemed 'too big to fail' can hold our Nation hostage via willing politicians willing to put these huge corporations on the dole and then run them as efficiently as the federal government can, which is at the post office level of things?

I am more than willing to let the rule of law run its course with these companies.

'Cash for Clunkers' was a nice one month sugar rush, but now the auto market is seeing less in the way of purchases as people decided to buy early and not try to get the best possible deal on a car later. Thus you are not getting a long term upturn in the market, but a short to mid length down turn that is happening during a recession. Thus making the recession worse. It is that same sort of 'do something for the sake of doing something without a plan' that is causing this problem. Extending loans to those who can't pay them back means more failed loans, not increased prosperity. Increased prosperity means more and better paying jobs and a competitive job market, not one with artificial price supports in it at the low end which places a barrier to entry for first time job holders in place because of the cost of hiring them. This is not getting people to work, allowing them to make a living for themselves, no matter how marginal, and making the entire cost of business much, much higher and encouraging businesses to lay off people at the low end. Which we now have during a recession with the latest minimum wage jump.

This economy is being run into the ground by politicians who think that we can regulate our way to nirvana, and willing followers who believe that everything in life should be regulated.

That is not a description of freedom, but one of tyranny.

The problems of federal 'help' in housing

2009-10-15T13:31:00.001-04:00

Looking at Steve Chapman's article at Reason on Mortgage Madness (Via Insty) there are a few interesting things that come to light.

First is that in this housing downturn the FHA often requires only 3.5% down on a mortgage, which means the lender is on hook for the rest. This in a market where commercial lenders are now wanting 20% down due to the number of foreclosures and people who default on their repayments.

Second is that the FHA now makes four times as many loans as it did during the height of the stock market bubble. And their foreclosure rate is climbing... meaning that they are going to 'need' another bailout right quick.

Third is that this lending by FHA is being done on their cash reserve of $30 billion in a bet that housing prices will not fall.

Fourth, as pointed out in the comments, the government now has an $8,000 first time buyer bonus tax credit which means you get to write off $8,000 in the purchase of a new home.

The net result?

Well, think of that $8,000 as the 3.5%, although it is actually less due to fees, etc. consider it a 'ball park estimate'.

That makes the 100% that you can get in the way of a home in the $228,000 range.

Turn and sell that home for anything almost immediately and you stand a good chance of making money on the deal as your first $8,000 is repaid via taxes and even a small amount of yield can pay for the paperwork of the original purchase and the resale, leaving a good sized net yield.

Free money!

If you can get it, that is.

Now we had all better hope it doesn't actually work that way.

Because the bet is that people will actually be able to get MORE for their homes, while the last three years has seen the market decline due to previous easy lending from the FHA and rules and regulations from the Community Reinvestment Act that pushed private lenders to accept more 'local' loans from people with poor ability to pay them back. What you would expect is that no one will pay for even the cost of those homes and that these first time buyers will take their tax credit and then default if they can't pay for their mortgage and would be unwilling to throw good money after bad by having paid more for a home in a declining home value market.

Which is what we have now.

Thus the reason people unable to get 20% down flock to the FHA.

Which is drawing on its reserves.

Which is seeing its default rate climb (these are Non-Performing Loans of the over 90 days past due type that are indicative of a shaky market).

Which means it will want another bailout.

To lend more to those unable to get a commercial loan.

And that starts the process all over again.

Then the amount we have to pay out on bonds will go up as people see the US as a bad place to invest since we will be inflating our currency to try and pay off this debt at a lower cost.

Mind you, the swell folks Upon The Hill are going to re-authorize the CRA to pressure more commercial banks to follow this routine.

The regulations have not worked as intended. The regulators are not exercising good fiscal judgment based on politically backed laws that require these things. And the commercial sector is trying its hardest to keep bad loans from getting into the market to stabilize it, but those lovely laws and regulations will increase the pressure to do otherwise.

I'm sure that will help us no end as the government seeks to inflate the housing bubble with tax dollars and debt at the National level.

All for that lovely government 'help'.

Not from Wall Street does this corruption come but DC.

'By the pricking of my thumbs,

Something wicked this way comes.'

- William Shakespear, Macbeth.

A Dangerous Enemy

2009-10-15T07:47:00.001-04:00

The following is a cross-post from The Jacksonian Party.

This is a personal outlook paper of The Jacksonian Party.

An interesting question cropped up when I was reading commentary at Hot Air looking at the difference between what President Obama said as a candidate and what he has done since taking office. Part of the outcome is looking at the concept that every promise by President Obama 'has an expiration date': it will have a time when he will come out and say and do the exact opposite of the promise. The Gay community has felt this in his promises on what he would do and his inactivity on those promises, but that is a smaller part of the overall set of promises on Guantanamo, Iraq, Afghanistan, Terrorism, and the Economy that have all been put forward one way, while campaigning, and then done another way while in office to date. Problems which look 'simple' to the candidate become 'complex' to the office holder, which is a normal part of human affairs, but how one approaches those complexities reveals much about the individual in question. Without exception President Obama has sought for more power and control to be vested in the federal government, the least accountable government in the Nation, and not trusted individuals to find their own use of liberty to sustain the Nation by using that liberty to create prosperity and freedom.

The reprisal of 'helping the poor' puts forward that only the federal government can do this, but the reason to being poor is so various, from a string of absolute bad luck to poor decision making to mental illness, that no one, single, unitary way to approach poverty can be performed. If it were 'just' money, then the hundreds of billions spent on anti-poverty programs would have ridded the Nation of poverty decades ago. Instead it has put individuals into situations where not working, not using your liberty and being rewarded for that has endangered the overall economy to actually sustain productivity so that there is a source of wealth to help the poor. Government does not create wealth, but currency: it is not the maker of things, but puts in place an established exchange unit that is worked with to create wealth. It is this simple understanding, that government is only the backer of society for creation of wealth and not the engine of wealth, that has, apparently, driven much of the policy of the federal government for nearly 80 years. Herbert Hoover was a Progressive Republican and FDR continued on many of the exact, same Progressive policies and then added his own into the mix, and none of them addressed that government taxing money, printing money, and distributing money for make-work jobs was not helping the overall economy but making it worse. By 1937 the actual recovery had been established, but the increased taxes put in from 1934-36, especially Social Security, would take a major bite out of that recovery, create the recession of 1938-39 and then stall out the overall recovery at a lower employment plateau. Double digit unemployment would not end until WWII was utilized as a means to move unemployed young men out of America, give them money they couldn't spend, and put the remaining population to work, thus utilizing the underutilized work of women and those who were too old to find jobs in the previous economy. Unless you were getting SSN, then you had to be offered a federally subsidized stable of 'goodies' in the way of health care that would outlive the war and haunt us to our current times.

One of the prime culprits of making the Great Depression possible was the fiscal policies of the Federal Reserve, the institution put in by President Wilson to centralize banking and finance under federal 'regulation'. And yet that 'regulation' called for fiscally unsound lending practices that led to the Great Depression and made it worse under Hoover and FDR. This is the manifestation of political power into the regulatory system, so as to reflect ideology and not sound fiscal practices, and it has spread to the SEC, FHA, Fannie and Freddie and numerous other 'helpful' government systems. By coupling political influence with garnering such positions in the regulatory system, regulators have become part of the political process, as particularly seen by Freddie and Fannie, both lobbying Congress directly with taxpayer backed funds at their beck and call. The appointment process to those two organizations has been one of politically well connected individuals getting appointment positions and then using those positions to further their political and ideological goals. The overall system described is one that the United States had discarded in another form after closing down the National Bank system that was, itself, not fiscally sound, having political appointees setting policy with little oversight, and allowing for outside influence to sway decisions that helped the well connected but did little for the common man. The elements brought up in the Bank Veto Message of 10 JUL 1832 sound as clear today as they did then and the second paragraph is clear on that score on what the dangers are:

A bank of the United States is in many respects convenient for the Government and useful to the people. Entertaining this opinion, and deeply impressed with the belief that some of the powers and privileges possessed by the existing bank are unauthorized by the Constitution, subversive of the rights of the States, and dangerous to the liberties of the people, I felt it my duty at an early period of my Administration to call the attention of Congress to the practicability of organizing an institution combining all its advantages and obviating these objections. I sincerely regret that in the act before me I can perceive none of those modifications of the bank charter which are necessary, in my opinion, to make it compatible with justice, with sound policy, or with the Constitution of our country.

A National Bank or Federal Reserve system is, indeed, useful to the Government and the people, but the powers, privileges and capabilities given to get that utility are not only unauthorized by the Constitution, but a deep source of corruption, influence peddling and cronyism, far beyond unsound fiscal policy. This Veto Message stands not just on Constitutional grounds, but practical and reasonable grounds as well, that examine the entire economic activity of the Nation, as a Nation, and then looks to how the corruption of the power is toxic to the States and the people, and ultimately to the Union. It is one of the foremost documents on National Fiscal Policy ever delivered by any President of any era, and yet remains largely unknown due to modern political 'sensibilities' not wanting to examine the deep questions of liberty associated with fiscal policy. Progressive era schooling, thusly, does not allow you to forget such works as it will not teach them to you: you are kept ignorant to meet a social agenda.

This problem was not unknown in the Founding era, and the Drafters of the Constitution had numerous and various problems addressing their critics, the so-called 'Anti-Federalists', many of whom were 'Federalists' as they saw it and criticized the Constitution on Federalist grounds. Even those who were not 'Federalists' and who just wanted a stronger Confederacy are not 'Anti-Federalist' in their insights, many of them based on human nature and the outcomes of past, historical systems of government that were well known in the era. Thus there is a question, or truly a series of questions, at the site Truth and Common Sense, revolving around a 'how would you bring down a democratic republic?' To do that requires little more than delving into the 'Anti-Federalist' archives at Teaching American History and reading as the objections, while diverse, continue to haunt us to this present day. Not all are salient, of course, and there are more than a few 'Anti-Federalist' hot heads who expounded conspiracy theories, just like our modern 'Truthers', those seeking the 'real assassin' of JFK, or how we got velcro which normally involves UFO cover-ups. Conspiracy theories go far back in history beyond the Knights Templar and into the plots and counter-plots of Kings, Emperors and Potentates very close to the beginning of actual recorded documents on clay tablets.

The need to explain the mundane, how a disturbed Communist sympathizer can assassinate a US President and then, in turn, be killed by a man who is not playing with a full deck but clearly was a patriot and did not want the President's death and widow to be un-avenged, puts two disturbed men influencing the course of the Nation and to many people there is no balance in that scale and, thusly, needs something 'deeper' to be playing out. Arch-Duke Ferdinand was assassinated by a Serbian who wanted Serbia to gain some freedom for the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and yet we get World War I as the result, thus putting a disturbing balance between those in power, those out of power and the mechanisms of government via a direct juxtaposition. Yet we accept that set of happenings and the millions dead that followed as they are, while not accepting the far lesser assassination of a President as somehow being 'proof' of a conspiracy. The first changed the course of world history, for the worse, and the second was a brutal assassination done by a committed ideologue who sought personal infamy and recognition. Of the two the first had dire consequences for the modern world, the second some ripples in the United States, yet it is the second that gains the conspiracy theory while the first is seen as a tragic happening normal in global affairs.

How normal? Presidents McKinley and Garfield were assassinated, and yet no real conspiracies grew up around their deaths. We remember President Lincoln because of the Civil War and see that assassination as its tragic capstone and the man a martyr to the cause of the Union. That actually did have a set of conspiratorial actors attempting multiple assassinations that night, but we downplay that conspiracy and play up one where there is no evidence of it. Negative proofs, by eliminating all other possibilities and then demonstrating something is or is not present by the lack of those things, are hard sells in mathematics, and the positive proof, the evidentiary proof far easier to piece together, even if it does not create an emotional sense of well-being in doing so. By trying to not accept the actual proof and testimonies of those involve, those pushing conspiracy theories want a negative proof as the standard so that anything that isn't directly recorded, but that can be accounted for, is proof of a 'conspiracy' covering up 'evidence'.

What this all too human need points to is trying to impress upon reality our emotional sensations. When done to a set of ideologies that have few connections to the real world, we get a fantasy ideology forming in which all the 'positive' evidence is retained and the 'negative' evidence discarded. Often we find forgery or fraudulent manipulation of the historical record both to make 'positives' appear and to make 'negatives' disappear. An old photograph of dinosaur tracks in a creek bed show later manipulation by 'creationists' trying to 'prove' that man walked with dinosaurs and the photography shows the differences decades apart: a simple field photo to show a representative sample of tracks against a modern photo of the same tracks shows manipulation of the tracks, themselves. Stalin had people removed or added to historical photos based on their current position in the hierarchy in an attempt to manufacture a 'perfect' history. That goes to the modern United States where you are not taught about the Bank Veto message or, indeed, given the actual words of Presidents beyond a few kept as 'samples' but often taken out of context. Thus something like The American Presidency Project that brings forth the actual documents of the Presidents allows us to see the actual office holders as they said they were and we need no longer resort to a bit here and a bit there chosen by those compiling books for selling to schools.

Much have I heard those on the Left on one such happening, that of the 'Trail of Tears' and they point to President Jackson with accusations of racism, and yet his First Annual Message on the State of the Union deals with the problem as seen then:

Your particular attention is requested to that part of the report of the Secretary of War which relates to the money held in trust for the Seneca tribe of Indians. It will be perceived that without legislative aid the Executive can not obviate the embarrassments occasioned by the diminution of the dividends on that fund, which originally amounted to $100,000, and has recently been invested in United States 3% stock.

The condition and ulterior destiny of the Indian tribes within the limits of some of our States have become objects of much interest and importance. It has long been the policy of Government to introduce among them the arts of civilization, in the hope of gradually reclaiming them from a wandering life. This policy has, however, been coupled with another wholly incompatible with its success. Professing a desire to civilize and settle them, we have at the same time lost no opportunity to purchase their lands and thrust them farther into the wilderness. By this means they have not only been kept in a wandering state, but been led to look upon us as unjust and indifferent to their fate. Thus, though lavish in its expenditures upon the subject, Government has constantly defeated its own policy, and the Indians in general, receding farther and farther to the west, have retained their savage habits. A portion, however, of the Southern tribes, having mingled much with the whites and made some progress in the arts of civilized life, have lately attempted to erect an independent government within the limits of Georgia and Alabama. These States, claiming to be the only sovereigns within their territories, extended their laws over the Indians, which induced the latter to call upon the United States for protection.

Under these circumstances the question presented was whether the General Government had a right to sustain those people in their pretensions. The Constitution declares that "no new State shall be formed or erected within the jurisdiction of any other State" without the consent of its legislature. If the General Government is not permitted to tolerate the erection of a confederate State within the territory of one of the members of this Union against her consent, much less could it allow a foreign and independent government to establish itself there.

[..]

There is no constitutional, conventional, or legal provision which allows them less power over the Indians within their borders than is possessed by Maine or New York. Would the people of Maine permit the Penobscot tribe to erect an independent government within their State? And unless they did would it not be the duty of the General Government to support them in resisting such a measure? Would the people of New York permit each remnant of the six Nations within her borders to declare itself an independent people under the protection of the United States? Could the Indians establish a separate republic on each of their reservations in Ohio? And if they were so disposed would it be the duty of this Government to protect them in the attempt? If the principle involved in the obvious answer to these questions be abandoned, it will follow that the objects of this Government are reversed, and that it has become a part of its duty to aid in destroying the States which it was established to protect.

Actuated by this view of the subject, I informed the Indians inhabiting parts of Georgia and Alabama that their attempt to establish an independent government would not be countenanced by the Executive of the United States, and advised them to emigrate beyond the Mississippi or submit to the laws of those States.

Our conduct toward these people is deeply interesting to our national character. Their present condition, contrasted with what they once were, makes a most powerful appeal to our sympathies. Our ancestors found them the uncontrolled possessors of these vast regions. By persuasion and force they have been made to retire from river to river and from mountain to mountain, until some of the tribes have become extinct and others have left but remnants to preserve for a while their once terrible names. Surrounded by the whites with their arts of civilization, which by destroying the resources of the savage doom him to weakness and decay, the fate of the Mohegan, the Narragansett, and the Delaware is fast over-taking the Choctaw, the Cherokee, and the Creek. That this fate surely awaits them if they remain within the limits of the States does not admit of a doubt. Humanity and national honor demand that every effort should be made to avert so great a calamity. It is too late to inquire whether it was just in the United States to include them and their territory within the bounds of new States, whose limits they could control. That step can not be retraced. A State can not be dismembered by Congress or restricted in the exercise of her constitutional power. But the people of those States and of every State, actuated by feelings of justice and a regard for our national honor, submit to you the interesting question whether something can not be done, consistently with the rights of the States, to preserve this much- injured race.

As a means of effecting this end I suggest for your consideration the propriety of setting apart an ample district west of the Mississippi, and without the limits of any State or Territory now formed, to be guaranteed to the Indian tribes as long as they shall occupy it, each tribe having a distinct control over the portion designated for its use. There they may be secured in the enjoyment of governments of their own choice, subject to no other control from the United States than such as may be necessary to preserve peace on the frontier and between the several tribes. There the benevolent may endeavor to teach them the arts of civilization, and, by promoting union and harmony among them, to raise up an interesting commonwealth, destined to perpetuate the race and to attest the humanity and justice of this Government.

This emigration should be voluntary, for it would be as cruel as unjust to compel the aborigines to abandon the graves of their fathers and seek a home in a distant land. But they should be distinctly informed that if they remain within the limits of the States they must be subject to their laws. In return for their obedience as individuals they will without doubt be protected in the enjoyment of those possessions which they have improved by their industry. But it seems to me visionary to suppose that in this state of things claims can be allowed on tracts of country on which they have neither dwelt nor made improvements, merely because they have seen them from the mountain or passed them in the chase. Submitting to the laws of the States, and receiving, like other citizens, protection in their persons and property, they will ere long become merged in the mass of our population.

It is plain that he is addressing a complex problem and pointing out the obligations of the United States from the start of this section on Indian Affairs. If he was 'racist' then why would he care that any Indians gaining funds promised to them had a shortfall in such funds? That is an embarrassment to the Union not to meet its obligations to the Sencas, and yet I have never heard this passage mentioned by those pointing at the 'Trail of Tears'. Right after that he points to the injustice of the Government's policy towards the Indian tribal lands and that the policy has driven Indians into a wandering state of affairs that helps no one and makes things more costly to the Union.

Yes, the great one who started the 'Trail of Tears' is railing against the injustice of the policy that will bring that 'Trail of Tears' about! Amazing, no?

And pointing out that it would be unconstitutional for the federal government to demand that the States cede portions of their territory, and that the States are sovereign in determining their territory and that no one else can force them to give up any of the territory, he then does what he can to inform the Indians wanting a carve-out that they are out of luck unless they can convince the States to otherwise recognize and hand over territory to them. He is begging with the States to do just that as the federal government doesn't have that power. He does what he can and offers territory that is, as yet, unsettled and unclaimed by the Union. He asks for a voluntary emigration and setting up of a regular set of governments in that territory. He does not want to see force used, and says so, clearly. He wanted an Indian Commonwealth beyond the Mississippi - a recognized government and Nation to deal with. The injustices had already been done by his time and he could not right those wrongs if the States did not help to do so.

If you have only learned the 'President Jackson was bad' meme, then you are being confronted with something that totally crosses that up. How you react depends on how you view the world.

A person with a fantasy ideology will find excuses, criticisms, and do anything to NOT deal with the historical facts present. These are facts by that President years before the 'Trail of Tears', and he is saying that he doesn't like the course of affairs, that it is unjust, that it is long standing, and that there is damned little he can do about it. Later Congressional actions will drive the course of affairs to a large degree as it is Congress that will have to pass and support the military means necessary to star the ball rolling. That inconvenient fact is also overlooked in the meme. Jackson has basically said he will carry out his Constitutional duties, and continues to do so in all other policy areas during his time in office: from working on Treaties (some with other Indians!) to getting the National Bank removed to ensuring that military veterans of the Revolution get a proper pension and forgiving current soldiers who have been out AWOL and otherwise disorderly, then discharging them. By resorting to a modern view of what 'racism' is, and attempting to put those views on the past, one overlooks that they were not the views then and that the ones given were the actual ones cited not just by President Jackson but by the States and Congress.

A person who finds themselves presented with actual facts that contradict what they have been taught who is willing to re-examine the record and not revert to easy, fantastical and ahistorical reasons for past actions will then re-examine the issue and start to ask some serious questions about what they were taught. Clear and contradictory evidence to what one is taught indicates something lacking in the teacher and the teaching establishment. One cannot say if it is because the instructor was ignorant, or the texts and teaching curriculum slanted and biased, or both, but one can say that it did not properly represent the era, the activities and the reasons given at the time by those involved. One cannot mind read into the actions of the dead and when their own, stated reasons that are then followed through on are brought to light there is a high coincidence of correlation between what is said and what is done. Imputing motives not given is an act of not believing what has been said in support of those actions and can only be done with contradictory evidence. In this case President Jackson is telling everyone that this will not end well along the current course of affairs and that he had limitations on what he could do as President.

Fantasy ideologies that become embedded in individuals are hard things to remove as they offer a comforting, non-reality based way of viewing the world that offers a form of reassurance that actually dealing with the world doesn't afford. Religion, itself, is trying to understand one's world and their place in it, but when it becomes an obsession that puts one out of touch with the world, as the Millerites did in the 19th century, the consequences can be troublesome. With a Jim Jones they become lethal to the believers and to a group like al Qaeda it becomes lethal or potentially so for everyone who does not see the world their way. There is a difference in believing in UFOs and believing a Mothership is trailing a comet and that all one has to do to get to it is kill yourself: one is an observation that there is unknown phenomena that cannot be easily explained and is unidentified, the other is believing that such things are a path to heaven via suicide. To those with a fantasy ideology no amount of actual, real world and demonstrable proof or evidence that goes against the world view of the fantasy will change their minds. Indeed alternative ways to explain such things, that are themselves fanciful and go beyond normal causality to look for a 'deeper truth' is what is sought. Anything that allows the fantasy to exist by twisting actual factual data to indicate something other than they do indicate is the goal of any believer in a fantasy ideology.

Looking at one of my previous works in regards to Socialism, my second critique goes to the actual Scientific Socialist view of Marx's works, and they are individuals who have most tried to apply some scientific principles to Marx, and yet find that when their analysis leads them out of real world human nature, that Marx is to be preferred over accounting for reality. This is part of the Theory and Practice Conundrum:

In theory there is no difference between theory and practice.

In practice there is.

Thus, accepting Marx's end-state analysis of how Socialism comes about as the final social order of humanity, one can then examine those end conditions and ask 'what satisfies these conditions?' In doing that one finds a wealth of problems in Socialism that requires not just technological achievement, but deep and profound changes in human nature that have been evidence at no time in human history on any scale. Even better is that Marx, himself, followed up on his beliefs and did things that modern Marxists/Socialists wouldn't understand, like support the North in the US Civil War as it was a power for advancing mankind and industry. The Scientific Socialists kept up with that, however, and the stories given me as I was growing up of Socialists who would resolutely stay at their jobs during the World Wars so as to support the betterment of mankind through the expanse of capitalism, so that capitalism can do its necessary work and then be supplanted, is one that does shock the modern Socialist Left and even the Socialist Right, come to think of it. Schismatic Socialist movements splintered from the main of Socialism, so that everything from Communism to Fascism to the 'feel good' NannyState have become its hallmarks. And yet each and every venue that is Socialist depends on the solid foundations laid out by Marx, and if one examines the foundations, they are less than sturdy and less than stable. And that was done in regards to my first article on Socialism.

That list of premises that must make the foundation of Socialism possible, the actual things that must come about, I will extract from my second document:

Premise 1: All working hours are equal, no matter the time investment into gaining the skills to do them.

Premise 2: One man shall *not* gain over another's work on an hour by hour valuation.

Premise 3: Workers know how best to do their work.

Premise 4: The amount of labor to complete a given task is static over time.

Premise 5: Work is its own reward in keeping society running.

If we recognize Liberty as self-evident in the nature of mankind, then utilizing Liberty means that each person prospers in accordance to their ability to apply their skills and receive recognition for those skills in the way of actual payment above and beyond the normal. A skilled craftsman is recognized as being above and beyond the norm and their works are appreciated as such. While one can argue that a cinematographer like Vertov, say, would not have appeared under Czarist rule, it is more than possible he would have appeared under capitalism with a generally liberal representative democracy in place that gave freedom of the marketplace to value some works more highly than others. Dziga Vertov demonstrates just the opposite of spreading skills under a non-rewards based system: no one in later years would ever accomplish such grand works in film as he did as the system did not reward invention, innovation or even good taste. It was in capitalist countries that his work would be influential, not in the USSR.

At this point many of the Scientific Socialists would point out that the USSR had not met the industrial pre-conditions put forth by Marx as necessary for Socialism and that the USSR was not 'socialist'. That is true, so far as it goes, but the shift from a form of serfdom to a society that did try to get an equalized end-state is ignored and the status of the USSR as a demonstration point on the feasibility, or lack thereof, of getting to that lovely end-state is tossed away in that analysis. The question is: would satisfying the industrial precondition change the result of the outcome of the Soviet experiment? Was it a matter of not having enough capitalism, not enough technology that makes the difference? Or is it in the nature of man, himself, outside of the preconditions that made achievement of such an end-state impossible or even desirable? Each of those premises has backing in a viewpoint of what human nature is and how human nature makes those end-states come about. Yet if the actual human nature is at variance with what is expected, then trying to change human nature, to shift it out of the nature of man as mortal, fallible, and prone to his own weakness, is folly and lethal simultaneously.

Our modern Transnational Progressivist Left and Right, like their antecedents in the various Socialist movements, likewise put forth broad and disturbing generalities of mankind in an attempt to undermine the Nation State system on an international scale. John Fonte has detailed the outlines of the goals of Transnational Progressivism which are little different on the Left or Right of that movement, save for emphasis on societal or industrial means:

Groups are what matter, not people. You are "Black" or "Christian" or "Mexican" or "Afghan" or "Sunni", you are not yourself. You also don't get to choose your group; it's inherent in what you were when you were born. Someone else will categorize you into your group, and you will become a number, a body to count to decide how important that group is. And your group won't change during your lifetime.

The goal of fairness is equality of result, not equality of opportunity. It isn't important to let individuals fulfill their potential and express their dreams, what's important is to make groups have power and representation in all things proportional to their numbers in the population. Fairness is for groups, not for individuals. The ideally fair system is based on quotas, not on merit, because that permits proper precise allocation of results.

Being a victim is politically significant. It's not merely a plea for help or something to be pitied; it's actually a status that grants extra political power. "Victimhood" isn't a cult, it's a valid political evaluation. Groups which are victims should be granted disproportionately more influence and representation, at the expense of the historic "dominant" culture.

Assimilation is evil. Immigrants must remain what they were before they arrived here, and should be treated that way. Our system must adapt to them, rather than expecting them to adapt to us (even if they want to). The migration of people across national borders is a way to ultimately erase the significance of those borders by diluting national identity in the destination country.

An ideal democracy is a coalition where political power is allocated among groups in proportion to their numbers. It has nothing to do with voting or with individual citizens expressing opinions, and in fact it doesn't require elections at all. A "winner take all" system, or one ruled by a majority, is profoundly repugnant because it disenfranchise minority groups of all kinds and deprives them of their proper share of power.

National identity is evil. We should try to think of ourselves as citizens of the world, not as citizens of the nations in which we live, and we should try to minimize the effects of national interests, especially our own if we live in powerful nations.

Fonte's descriptive analysis serves as a handy test to see if a political position put forth is bound by this ideology. There is no handbook of the Transnational Progressivist just as there was no ready handbook of Progressivism: the days of actually having to state what you believe in as a coherent view of society and man's place in creating it are no longer the goal of Progressivism, save to put both society and individuals under the rule of a self-described elite. This system is not just Transnational, but anti-Nation State at its core. Yet the Nation State is the creation of mankind across the globe, and wherever man has created culture of any sort, man has created States and Nation States. While there are technological gulfs between the Incan Empire and the Roman Empire, or between the Iriquois Nations and Swiss Confederation, the actual utilization of Nation State diplomacy, many of its features and ways to address other powers was highly similar. As was examined in the 17th to 19th century, this is due to the similarity of the nature of man and how he derives culture, self-governance, States and then Nations to deal with other States. The Nation State is the creation of mankind to protect cultures that are different, and yet recognize that other cultures are valid and recognizes other Nation States as equals in those terms, if not economic, social or military terms. Indeed it is talked about from ancient times through the 12th century in England all the way up to the 19th century and the forms and formulas of embassies, treaties, Nation to Nation agreements, pomp and circumstance is all guided by those understandings that we now accept as common.

Progressivism wanted to co-opt the power of the State and such social organs as Labor Unions as a means to break up the 'dominant' culture in the United States and elsewhere. Yet there was a major setback in that agenda that still exists to this day, as described by Walter Russell Mead in The Jacksonian Tradition (archive of that article here):

Most progressive, right thinking intellectuals in mid-century America believed that the future of American populism lay in a social democratic movement based on urban immigrants. Social activists like Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger consciously sought to use cultural forms like folk songs to ease the transition from the old individualistic folk world to the collective new one that they believed was the wave of the future; they celebrated unions and other strange, European ideas in down home country twangs so that, in the bitter words of Hiram Evans, "There is a steady flood of alien ideas being spread over the country, always carefully disguised as American."

What came next surprised almost everyone. The tables turned, and Evans’ Americans "americanized" the immigrants rather than the other way around. In what is still a largely unheralded triumph of the melting pot, Northern immigrants gradually assimilated the values of Jacksonian individualism. Each generation of new Americans was less "social" and more individualistic than the preceding one. American Catholics, once among the world’s most orthodox, remained Catholic in religious allegiance but were increasingly individualistic in terms of psychology and behavior ("I respect the Pope, but I have to follow my own conscience"). Ties to the countries of emigration steadily weakened, and the tendency to marry outside the group strengthened.

By the late 20th century this force was actively being opposed by the cultural elite who were adhering to a fantasy ideology of there being some societal equivalence at the society level between all societies, and that it was politically correct not to refer to the differences and problems in other societies and, instead, vilify your own society's problems and equalize them with those of other societies. Thus workplace discrimination in America is equated with discrimination in totalitarian regimes, such as China, that have even worse records of humanitarian discrimination and xenophobia behind them. The lack of gays having 'equal rights' in America to government recognition of things like marriage, are directly equated to the lofty elevation of gays in places like Iran who consign them to the grave. 'Enlightened' European Nations have socialized medicine that is costly to their Nations, bankrupting them, and often hard to get or have governments unwilling to even find out the quality of health care received, and that is directly equated to America where there are no dead on the streets and willingness to not purchase 'health insurance' is an exercise of liberty and a personal assessment of risk and benefits. At all points State control and telling the individual what to do is elevated over individual liberty and freedom to decide one's life for oneself.

Yet that is the role of government: to restrict, to punish. It is not a provider of 'good things' save in what it doesn't do, which is to straightjacket society with regulations in an attempt to force people to become 'good' and 'socially aware' by punishing them when they are not. Socialism had, at least, the belief that man saw work as its own reward, regardless of station in life, and that one got according to one's needs. When those needs are dictated to you, then you are no longer a citizen but a subject of the State. That is Transnational Progressivism's ideal: to make all individuals subjects to their States, beholden to their government and to force elitist views on what is and is not good upon all people.

Save the Elites, of course, they are above any rules, any laws, and any accountability.

That is the end of forcing people to 'do good' and punishing them if they do so in ways that are not acceptable to the State. It is a fantasy ideology that we can all think alike and 'be different' at the same time, and that human nature can, indeed, be overturned by government fiat. And yet those that come to power are no less human, no less susceptible to the temptations of mortal life than those they seek to rule, and often their excesses are made the worst because they feel that any 'good end' justifies their activities. That is not a description of freedom but of tyranny.

It is strange that so many want that tyranny because they believe it really will turn out 'all right' and 'better' for all concerned.

Don't mind the governments, States, Nations and Empires that have all ruled this way to the non-benefit of their people.

Only good intentions matter, even as the blood to get those intentions put in place run under the boots of those bringing it about and stain their hands, spatter their faces to put a red tinged haze around those 'good intentions' as that is the end of Elite rule wherever it is tried.

Sights I wonder about

2009-10-08T20:08:00.001-04:00

Just a quickie gripe...

Ruger has this fun idea that they won't actually screw their sight leaf screw down properly on the Mark III's. Amazing, really, that you end up wondering about just why you have problems hitting what you aim at until you properly set the thing. The rest of the gun is a precision mechanism. The sight is left to wander around. Strange, that.

Kahr/Auto-Ordnance needs to address this with the four screws they use on their leaf sights for the Thompson as mine worked loose damned near simultaneously, and two screws went flying off into the wild blue yonder due to that. The other two came off with the sight. I hope that other people don't have similar experiences as it is a bit disconcerting. More than a bit, really.

Haven't these guys heard of Loctite? You don't need the super-duper, needs heat treatment to loosen it sort... just the small screw sort. I'm sure that extra tenth of a cent that it would cost to do that wouldn't break any company or raise the end cost all that much. And as it is the lower strength stuff, so it would let mere mortals actually take the screws out if you wanted to actually swap sights.

I like everything else about the equipment, but for any new firearms I guess the very first thing to do is to see if the companies actually bothered to secure their sights.

Moore is less

2009-10-07T18:17:00.001-04:00

As some may have noticed I have moved more to a bit of commentary here and there and less to blog posts, but as I had done before and put down over-long comments, I continue to do. So to capture some of that blather, I will hand you what I put down at Hot Air which had an article about Michael Moore being interviewed by Sean Hannity and the question of forgiving of al Qaeda in respect to WWJD was brought up by Moore. Most of the interview was spent on such things as Moore's recent movie and how those NINJAs that took loans were, to Moore, equivalent of rape victims... because they entered into contracts as adults and couldn't meet their obligations.

Little does anyone suspect that these two things, forgiveness of al Qaeda and loans from contracts, are intimately entwined.

I just have to go back a bit to show why.

What follows is as posted in the commentary, and as I am pretty busy I probably won't be able to respond there as being a little bit better doesn't mean I'm at all physically well.

* * *

al Qaeda is not just a foe nor even normal enemy. Such is the view of Law of Nations as seen by de Vattel in Book III:

§ 67. It is to be distinguished from informal and unlawful war.

Legitimate and formal warfare must be carefully distinguished from those illegitimate and informal wars, or rather predatory expeditions, undertaken either without lawful authority or without apparent cause, as likewise without the usual formalities, and solely with a view to plunder. Grotius relates several instances of the latter.5 Such were the enterprises of the grandes compagnies which had assembled in France during the wars with the English, — armies of banditti, who ranged about Europe, purely for spoil and plunder: such were the cruises of the buccaneers, without commission, and in time of peace; and such in general are the depredations of pirates. To the same class belong almost all the expeditions of the Barbary corsairs: though authorized by a sovereign, they are undertaken without any apparent cause, and from no other motive than the lust of plunder. These two species of war, I say, — the lawful and the illegitimate, — are to be carefully distinguished, as the effects and the rights arising from each are very different.

By engaging in Private War, illegitimate to all of mankind, al Qaeda breaks with civilization entirely. They have declared themselves beyond the bounds of all laws and set themselves up as the only ones fit to judge their actions. Each and every member does this and, in joining with al Qaeda, steps away from the protection of the civil law prefering, instead, God’s Law of Nature which red in tooth and claw.

Nor is this isolated to just this venue, as de Vattel worked with Blackstone who wrote commentaries on the Common Law of England. Before the Revolution this is how Private War in the realm of Piracy, which is no different from any other sort of illegitimate war, was seen:

LASTLY, the crime of piracy, or robbery and depredation upon the high seas, is an offense against the universal law of society; a pirate being, according to Sir Edward Coke,10 hostis humani generis [enemy to mankind]. As therefore he has renounced all the benefits of society and government, and has reduced himself afresh to the savage state of nature, by declaring war against all mankind, all mankind must declare war against him: so that every community has a right, by the rule of self-defense, to inflict that punishment upon him, which every individual would in a state of nature have been otherwise entitled to do, any invasion of his person or personal property.

BY the ancient common law, piracy, if committed by a subject, was held to be a species of treason, being contrary to his natural allegiance; and by an alien to be felony only: but now, since the statute of treasons, 25 Edw. III. c. 2. it is held to be only felony in a subject.11 Formerly it was only cognizable by the admiralty courts, which proceed by the rule of the civil law.12 But, it being inconsistent with the liberties of the nation, that any man’s life should be taken away, unless by the judgment of his peers, or the common law of the land, the statute 28 Hen. VIII. c. 15. established a new jurisdiction for this purpose; which proceeds according to the course of the common law, and of which we shall say more hereafter.

Thus Piracy is a two-fold act in the Common Law. First and foremost it is a violation of the Law of Nations, which is that area of law that we create in our associations with others. The Law of Nations is NOT part of the civil law as noted by Bracton centuries before Blackstone when he wrote his commentaries on the Laws of England. It is one of the strongest views of how we create society via those associations:

What the jus gentium is.

[017] 33The jus gentium is the law which men of all nations use, which falls short of
[018] natural law since that is common to all animate things born on the earth in the
[019] sea or in the air. From it comes the union of man and woman, entered into by the
[020] mutual consent of both, which is called marriage. Mere physical union is [in the
[021] realm] of fact and cannot properly be called jus since it is corporeal and may be
[022] seen;34 all jura are incorporeal and cannot be seen. From that same law there
[023] also35 comes the procreation and rearing of children. The jus gentium is common
[024] to men alone, as religion observed toward God, the duty of submission to parents
[025] and country, or the right to repel violence and injuria. For it is by virtue of this
[026] law that whatever a man does in defence of his own person he is held to do lawfully;
[027] since nature makes us all in a sense akin to one another it follows that for one to
[028] attack another is forbidden.36

In creating families the basis for all other forms of human community are formed: without that basic understanding of the necessity to give up a portion of our liberty to sustain our children, we cannot create civilization. The civil law comes long after that basic association, which makes the law of nations, jus gentium, primary law even when it is unwritten. The writing of de Vattel was to help codify that unwritten law, to have a basis of common understanding solidified so that we could understand this thing we create called ‘nations’. Bracton continues on, and really Mr. Moore, by asking the question, raises the exact law that crosses from al Qaeda to loan holders, but he does not realize it:

What manumission is.

[030] 37Manumissions also come from the jus gentium. Manumission is the giving of
[031] liberty, that is, the revelation of liberty, according to some, for liberty, which
[032] proceeds from the law of

[001] nature, cannot be taken away by the jus gentium but only obscured by it,38 for
[002] natural rights are immutable. But say that he who manumits does properly give
[003] liberty, though he does not give his own but another’s, for one may give what he
[004] does not have, as is apparent in the case of a creditor, who [may alienate a pledge
[005] though the thing is not his,39 and in that of one who] constitutes a usufruct in his
[006] property.40 For natural rights are said to be immutable because they cannot be
[007] abrogated or taken away completely, though they may be restricted or diminished
[008] in kind41 or in part. 42It was by virtue of this jus gentium that wars were introduced
[009] (that is, when declared43 by the prince for the defence of his country44 or to repel
[010] an attack) and nations separated, kingdoms established and rights of ownership
[011] distinguished. Individual ownership was not effected de novo by the jus gentium but
[012] existed of old, for in the Old Testament things were already mine and thine, theft
[013] was prohibited45 and it was decreed that one not retain his servant’s wages.46 By
[014] the jus gentium boundaries were set to holdings, buildings erected next to one
[015] another, from which cities, boroughs and vills were formed.47 And generally, the
[016] jus gentium is the source of all contracts48 and of many other things. What long
[017] custom is will be explained below.49

Civil contract law comes from that basic law that we create amongst ourselves, the private law of jus gentium. Beyond families, when we build and create and live near to others, we have an understanding of property as the creative act is the exercise of liberty on our own behalf. It is with liberty that we create, that we do associate and that we create the very laws we live by. Liberty goes beyond property and to the very heart of all our rights: without liberty we have no rights. We yield a portion of our natural liberty, which is our negative liberty, to our associated creation which is society, the state and the Nation. In resuming these rights, those in any organization or, indeed, alone, who practice Private War are no longer bound to our loving grace. It is not we who absent them from civil society, but their actions which do so. Those who remain in the civil realm, who have exercised liberty and then are unable to sustain their contracts are bound by the jus gentium for civil penalties if such have been established and private ones if they have not. Still, via Bracton, those private ones are established by area and venue in the Common Law, and not created out of thin air but by common agreement in the local society.

The second venue is the civil law, of course, as that is part of the fruits of jus gentium. Here differing Nations decide venues for prosecution differently. Up to the time of Henry VIII the violations were those of either War or Admiralty, depending on venue for land and sea. The sea based portion, as it deals with the problems of contracts, was moved to the civil law save for those portions dealing with National Letters of Marque and Reprisal so as to harm those who have reverted to Nature and recognize no civil discourse. We withhold love and forgiveness until those who have become such enemies to all that is civilized realize their error and submit themselves to the civil law. As we are not God, not Divine and cannot hold all forgiveness in our hearts and are only mortal, we recognize that the boundaries of our very mortality guide us in creating jus gentium. We add penalties to both the civil and military realms for those who break that basis of civilization. Final forgiveness is for that which has it within them to hand out and we would presume too much and forget that we are mortal if we are expected to hand out forgiveness without seeing repentance and submission to the civil law so as to win back to the jus gentium.

In God we trust.

All others pay cash.

* * *

I'll say this much: Michael Moore doesn't realize the two topics are part of the same venue.

But then the modern Left has been trying to have us forget just how and why we do come together to each other. And why the Law of Nations is not a description of 'international law'.

The Devil Made Me Do It

2009-09-26T08:58:00.002-04:00

President Obama along with the heads of Great Britain and France made a statement that they have INTEL that Iran has the facility up and running to enrich uranium and that the facility has no international inspection regime over it and that the worst must be suspected. France announced that Iran has until DEC 2009, after the German elections, to come clean on its activities and open up for inspection. Of course al Qaeda is already threatening Germany that it is not supine enough to al Qaeda's liking and that they better elect an appeasement and withdrawal government and get out of Afghanistan. The 'or else' is implied.

Iran doubled down on the reactors and they have two such plants.

Someone came in a day late and a plant short, that being the IAEA. They missed an entire enrichment facility in Iran and now we find out about it. I should think that building such a thing might just be a little obvious and that the IAEA would have had a clue some years previous to this.

Cause for worry, no?

But let me take up a position that I do not sponsor, do not believe in, because it is one worth doing, at this point. I will take up the Leftist position on Iran and now put forward the same, exact outlook that they took on Iraq. Fun will not be had.

Say that the Devil made me do it.

First off is that INTEL is so unreliable as to be useless. When tyrants bluster about sophisticated technology, it is just that, bluster. Really they are oppressed leaders of oppressed Nations and can't help but cry out to just gain attention. They need our 'help' not our confrontation because, you know, all those spooks and spies lie all the time to get their way on foreign policy. President Bush was one of the following or all three, depending on who you listened to on what topic and when:

A) A dunce who couldn't think his way out of a paper bag.
B) A fool who would believe anything that the CIA and other leaders put in front of him.
C) An evil genius looking to rule the world.

Ahmadinejad is just like Saddam in this in that he has said multiple, different things in order to gain attention and their missiles can only take regular, everyday, common warheads that they hand over to Hezbollah. Plus he says this is for making nuclear fuel AND nuclear medicines, and who would lie about those things, right?

Second is that the US is the oppressor. We put sanctions on Iran when they took our Embassy staff captive against all forms of International Law but, hey, that was decades ago before many on the Left were even born. Its HISTORY. Ok, the armed group Hezbollah has killed US and French soldiers looking to help Lebanon out, but that was HISTORY TOO! And Iran has been tied in with the Hezbollah attacks in Argentina because Iran's friend, Syria, wanted advanced missile and nuclear technology from it. But that... well that was in HIST... oh, wait that was 1994. Can't be history. Still we put on sanctions and CAUSED all of that, its OUR FAULT if they want high tech weapons. So we should end the sanctions, no harm will ever come to us because, you know, the past is history.

Third is that there are no, real, WMDs in Iran. No one has seen them, therefore they don't exist. And trying to say they are building them and just need the radioactive material is WARMONGERING. That's oppression! If we would just be NICE to them they wouldn't be so BAD. Probably tyrannical to their own people, yes, but we can help END THAT by GIVING THEM MONEY. If we did that we could get some access to their facilities, just like we did with the oh-so-nice USSR, no? Oh, wait... well... still giving money is a lot better than war! Having to pay Danegeld is always the best way.... We don't ever need to be worried about Iran actually trying to attack us and that they did that to our Embassy which IS considered sovereign territory under international law doesn't mean they broke international law! And electing one of the people who took part in the Embassy invasion and hostage taking as the head of the Nation doesn't mean that Iran is scoffing at international law!

Fourth is that it is all a plot to get Iranian oil. Everything is a plot. On the part of the US and Europe and Iran is just responding naturally to plots against it. Its our fault. No blood for oil!!!

Fifth is that these white leaders... errrrr.... Imperialist Leaders....ahhhhh.... semi-white capitalist sycophants? Hmmmm... that works! Semi-white capitalist sycophant running dogs (yeah RUNNING DOGS, lets see them respond to that!) of BIG OIL don't care about those funny people in Iran and are just out to exploit them and their natural resources and enslave them to have to work for a living! Yeah, that's the ticket!

The above are the Devil's Advocate positions put up by the individuals and groups who derided Bush and operations in Iraq, amended lightly for Iran. I count them as the message of the SLA: Semi-conscious Liberation Army.

If the Left had any consistency, honesty or courage, those are the things they would be saying about President Obama and the situation in Iran. I know that because I've heard them all brought up as multiple 'reasons' or 'root causes' in similar venues about Iraq, just put down the Embassy bombing and such to the fact that Saddam would not keep his agreements under international law after the First Gulf War, and that his funding of Palestinian terrorists, handing out processing techniques to al Qaeda that showed up in Hekmatyar's organization in London and in Afghanistan under the Taliban are the rough equivalents to the far cozier and deeper relationship of Iran and its founding of Hezbollah.

I mean if the Left actually BELIEVED those things then Barack Obama is one of many things:

A) A dunce being dazzled by more sophisticated leaders on the global stage.

B) A fool who will believe anything handed to him by these operators.

C) Naive in thinking that Iran means any harm to the world or anyone on it outside of Iran, save for some nasty incidents that really were just an indication of how oppressed Iran is.

D) Corrupted already by 'the system'.

E) Evil Genius, save that he couldn't sell a used health plan to anyone save the far Left who wants a total government take-over of everything, immediately, for our own good.

F) Being used by 'the powers that be' , lied to by international leaders who are trying to make him the sock puppet for their oil needs, and by Ahmadinejad who is playing back and forth on the 'do we or don't we, double or nothing' game just like Saddam did. Because, really, Iran, Russia and China are much better places than France, Great Britain or the US.

Or all of them. The SLA has never been all that coherent on things.

My view?

One - Iran is a threat and a demonstrated one since the Embassy take-over. They have never apologized for that nor offered those who take part up to the US to be tried under our laws for those crimes committed on US soil at our Embassy compound.

Two - Iran is a continued threat in using an extra-national private war organization called Hezbollah to attack targets on land and at sea without warning. The list of Nations that have a Hezbollah presence is long, and even limiting it to those they have attacked still leaves you with most European Nations, a scattering of North African Nations, Argentina (if not others although tracking them out of the TBA is damned hard), the US, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Chechnya, and a few other places less savory in the old 'stans area of ex-Soviet Republics in Central Asia. For its sea-based attacks Hezbollah is a piracy operation, and by funding those Iran is also culpable for those actions under its auspices.

Three - Iran has funded 'insurgencies' in Iraq and Afghanistan with literal tons of equipment captured that have been manufactured in Iran: missiles, bombs, machine guns, explosively formed projectiles, IED components, uniforms, radios... a long, long list of training and equipment. It meddles in the politics of Iraq via Moqtada al Sadr and endorses violence in Iraq, save when al Sadr gets cold feet and needs to run for 'religious training', no doubt with AK-47s and RPGs.

Four - Iran has had nuclear weapons ambitions very close to its founding during the Cold War, when nuclear weapons were seen as 'legitimizers' for playing in the arena of Super-Power politics on an international scale. After that they just want to destroy Israel and threaten their neighbors. The first was pure hubris, of course, but not to be discounted as a starting point. The latter two have driven Iran and Iraq under Saddam, especially during their 1980's war that killed millions on both sides and saw Saddam deploy nerve gas and Iran deploy children on the battlefront. Iran, on its end, formed a close alliance with Syria that had long range missile technology, has not signed on to the Chemical Weapons convention, has tried to get enrichment facilities for its phosphate deposits so as to extract uranium from them, gulled the Swedes into selling them such a plant, had started on a bio-weapons program, and has the manufacturing and technical expertise to know the WMD issues... if not the cash to carry them out. Iran has that cash. The Israeli's bombed the attempted start-up of a Syrian/North Korean processing site for getting enriched uranium beyond 'yellowcake' concentrations. There is some expectation that Iran has shared technology with Syria in that venue. So both are proliferating WMD technology. Further Iran took part in the AQ Khan network which has workable uranium bomb designs and schematics. Also that networked served to funnel Chinese, North Korean and even some Japanese nuclear technology into the network, with Japan having Mitutoyo sell 10,000 separators on the black market in violation of all international agreements Japan signed up to.

Five - Iran doesn't give a damn about international law. It breaks treaties, proliferates WMD technology, serves as a trans-shipment point for various black market networks (including such things as heroin, cocaine, and small arms to various Hezbollah organizations), encourages black market work by Hezbollah operations, and has sought to extend power and influence via Hezbollah into The Balkans, South America, Africa, Europe proper, SE Asia, and even into North America. The North American operations run by the late Imad Mugniyah incorporated such things as tobacco tax fraud, banking fraud, black/grey market dealings, car theft (if the reports are to be believed), and shipping drugs across North America via Mexican drug gangs. Each of those have cases in the US and Canada to back them, although the car theft part is harder to ID as part of the larger Albanian ex-pat criminal organizations that Iran semi-cooperates with. They do similar with Russia, with shipments of cocaine from Hezbollah in S. America showing up in St. Petersburg (Russia) in 20 ton lots. That ain't chicken feed.

Six - Iran is run by a group of individuals who are old, about one-deep in leadership, and who have a fantasy ideology about the end times and the 12th Imam. They also want to blow Israel off the map, bring harm to the US (the Great Satan) and generally get their belief on how Islam should run the world as an operational idea. Israel has a small unannounced but widely known defensive nuclear arsenal: you attack the with nukes and you can say good-bye to the world.

Seven - The money is on Iran having one or more nuclear processing facilities with the sweet possibility they are also using some small amount of Syrian help, and possibly giving better processing technology to North Korea.

Eight - Gazprom told the Russian government a couple of years ago NOT to invest any money into the petroleum/gas infrastructure of Iran. China pulled out of a $10 billion support deal for the Iranian petroleum infrastructure. All international analysis in those sectors points to a Nation ruining their natural resource exploitation system and that now must import not only refined gasoline, but even simple natural gas from outside their country. The infrastructure of Iran is being driven into the ground as bad or possibly even worse than Saddam did by not repairing his infrastructure: at least that needed wholesale replacement due to there being no infrastructure to repair. Iran is not so lucky and will need a retail replacement with each and every single part analyzed and replaced before it all implodes in the next five years or so. Want a real oil shock? Iran can't meet its export agreements and hasn't for years now. It is a net IMPORTER of natural gas and refined petroleum products. I disagree with Dick Morris on these points, and deeply: he has gotten the direction and amount of flow of natural gas and refined petroleum products wrong, and is still thinking in 1990's terms on Iran. Russia supports Iran for its own reasons, mostly getting paid for the stuff they have already done there, some for geopolitics against the West, some for the natural gas fields and oil fields in Iran that Russia could run better than Iran can at the moment.

When you add these things up you get an Iranian government (and I do hope the Iranian people can bring this baby down) that is: tyrannical, imperial, aggressive, expansionistic and dictatorial with a lovely dash of fantasy ideology thrown in to give the thing a piquant stench. Plus its eggshell economy is about to implode. I'm not too fond of the damned government and hope that the Iranian people can find the path to liberty and freedom and get rid of it. Unfortunately they are on their own in doing so: the US has given active and vocal support of their despotic government and not even a bone to those actually laying their lives down to free their fellow countrymen.

That is a black mark against America.

A deep stain that shows how callow we can be, as a Nation, to disdain supporting those who fight for freedom and liberty in all venues, even just in rhetoric.

Pushing 'health care' when there are nuts trying to get WMDs is a pointless exercise: when you are part of a WMD attack, no health insurance in the world will pay for that. Especially if you are dead.

You want WMD Life Insurance on that, instead. Good luck in finding it after the last couple of days.

To me the Left went certifiably nuts when they could not understand that there are Levels of Confidence with all INTEL and that no INTEL is 100%. To restate: there is no INTEL that is deemed 100% accurate with confidence. You may have a high level of confidence, say 90%, but that is not 100%. If you want 100%, you must invade and find out for YOURSELF on the ground what is going on. We have to trust these analysts as they are, surprisingly, conservative and don't like to step beyond their level of confidence in anything as it can come back to haunt them for the rest of their lives when they are WRONG. That is why you do NOT put political pressure of ANY sort on INTEL: the analysts must be given leeway to operate in an environment so they can weigh what is known, what they can't know and what they are trying to infer and political views get in the way of that no end and you wind up with faulty INTEL work. I don't like political pressure on INTEL from the POTUS and I don't like it from inside Agencies trying to run their own agendas, but that is something I have looked at multiple times elsewhere and will not further that here.

We cannot run a Nation or our relationships with others on good wishes and hoping for the best, because THAT is also a fantasy ideology and doesn't deal with the way people actually do things and why. Trying to imply motives is mind reading. What people do and comparing that to what they say then allows you to derive the truthfulness of what they say by what they do: it is evidence based analysis. It is prone to have levels of confidence. That sucks. That is how the real world works. If you don't like it, then please move to an alternate reality where that does work. Trying to bring that reality here will get us all killed.

Instead of 'shovel ready'

2009-09-19T18:23:00.002-04:00

Interesting days on the financial side of things, no?

Take, for example, Fannie Mae's draw on the US Treasury after a $14.8 billion loss (Source: Al Yoon, 05 AUG 2009 at al-Reuters):

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Fannie Mae, the largest provider of U.S. home mortgage funding, on Thursday reported a $14.8 billion quarterly net loss that it said would force it to go to the U.S. Treasury trough a third time for money to stay in business.
The company noted a "significant uncertainty" of its long-term financial health in reporting its eighth consecutive quarterly loss, which illustrates its struggle to make money in the face of rising defaults and pressure to do more to stabilize the housing market.

Say, isn't Fannie Mae supposed to be one of those lovely government backed organizations that does so much 'good' for borrowers? If so, then what is up with the big, bad nasty loss after the 'stimulus'?

Ah, just a drop in the bucket that, after all...

How about Freddie Mac? Doing great, huh?

From Trading Markets, 07 AUG 2009 we can find that Freddie is turning a profit:

(RTTNews) - Friday, government-sponsored home mortgage finance company Freddie Mac (FRE Quote Chart News PowerRating), reported a swing to profit in the second quarter of 2009 from a loss a year ago, driven by higher net interest income reflecting a $4.2 billion gain on its derivative portfolio. On account of funding commitment to the Treasury Department, Freddie Mac has paid out a dividend of $1.14 billion on the its senior preferred stock. The dividend payment has left Freddie Mac with a loss attributable to common shareholders, however, one that narrowed from last year. Further, the mortgager noted that it would not request any additional financial support from the federal government. Freddie Mac indicated signs of slowing in home price declines, however, remains cautious due to rising foreclosures, growing unemployment, tight lending standards and buyers' reluctance to re-enter the market.
The McLean, Virginia-based company reported that its second quarter net income attributable to the company totaled $768 million, compared to a loss of $821 million in the prior-year quarter.
The company paid out a dividend of of $1.14 billion to the U.S. Department of the Treasury on the senior preferred stock during the second quarter.
After the dividend pay out, Freddie Mac posted a loss attributable to the common shareholders of $374 million or $0.11 per share, compared to a loss of $1.05 billion or $1.63 per share in the same quarter last year.

Oh, it only moved in a profitable direction. It still posted a loss after getting Treasury help. And from that nasty 'derivatives' sector that everyone decried from SEP to DEC 2008, you remember the folks who supposedly played lots of games with the market? Well Freddie Mac is helping them to do that, it appears.

That must mean all is going swimmingly with FHA, right?

From Friday Morning Federal Newscast at Federal News Radio 18 SEP 2009:

The Federal Housing Administration, hit hard by the mortgage crisis, is in need of a cash infusion. For the first time, cash reserves will drop below the minimum level set by Congress according to FHA officials. The FHA part of Housing and Urban Development insures mortgages against losses and guaranteed about a quarter of all U.S. home loans made this year. The Washington Post reports rather than raise fees or go to Congress for a bail out the agency is considering a proposal that would require banks and lenders to keep a million dollars in capital to repay the agency for losses due to fraud to make up the shortfall.

Say, instead of asking others to cover for the FHA, how about taking the regulations off the books that allow people with No Income, No Jobs or Assets (NINJAs) to get loans? That might help a whole lot more by getting creditworthy borrowers into the system and ease the un-creditworthy ones out as they default on loans.

Do remember that one of the groups to push for that was ACORN Housing Affordable Loans, LLC, with the help of many:

"Bank of America is proud to participate in the launch of ACORN's mortgage brokerage," said Glenda Gabriel, Bank of America Neighborhood Lending Executive. "Working with ACORN, this valuable partnership will make Bank of America's suite of safe and affordable mortgage products more accessible to first-time homebuyers interested in achieving the American dream of home ownership."
"Over the last 12 months, we have worked diligently together to get ACORN established as a broker, provided training and support as they set up their broker operations and strategy. The launch today is a culmination of these efforts. We are proud to announce this alliance with Acorn Housing Corporation," said Danny Gardner, National Director of Strategic Markets for CitiMortgage. "In the current climate, we feel the mortgage products we are offering through this relationship will not only help first-time homebuyers looking for a home but also may help those faced with rising mortgage payments."
"First American Title has been a committed partner in the industry in serving low-to-moderate income and multicultural families in achieving the American dream of homeownership. We are happy to take another step forward with this partnership with ACORN Housing Corporation, " said Lionel Savage, Vice President for Lender Services and Industry Relations, First American Title Insurance Company. "First American Strategic Markets is fully equipped with assisting in this partnership with our multicultural escrow and closing services and tools that directly address the need for education about the homebuying process amongst the multicultural community."
"Fannie Mae is proud to work with ACORN Housing, " said Thomas Collins, Director, Single Family Business, and Fannie Mae. By working with ACORN and lenders like Citibank, we can support their efforts to expand homeownership opportunities for underserved communities at affordable price points achieve sustainable homeownership."

Yup and the ACORN folks are a small business by the SBA rules on such, so can get preferential treatment! It has truly taken a great number of swell hearted fools handing out federal money hand over fist, no money down, low interest for the first year, no questions asked to get the mortgage sector into this mess.

But 'cash for clunkers' was a glorious success, no?

From Gary E. Sattler at BloggingStocks comes this analysis:

Analysts are also pointing out that consumers who purchased vehicles during this period paid higher prices on average for those vehicles than purchasers in the previous month. It is believed that the Clunker vouchers dampened the spirit of wheeling and dealing by helping to reduce initial sticker shock.
The data also shows that the average age of traded-in vehicles during this period almost doubled. In this regard, the Clunkers program was a great success. While consumers put new cars into service, saving themselves fuel expense and short-term maintenance costs, they also created a flurry of new consumer debt. However, negative equity of trade-ins dropped to its lowest point of the year, thereby considerably reducing the "rollover debt" factor.
Another noteworthy sales dynamic I garnered from the article is the fact that the value of vehicles sold during this period actually trended downward, indicating that the program's vehicle value cap did in fact limit or direct consumer choice. People bought less car for more money. The facts speak for themselves.

To get the 'good' of lower mileage cars, consumers paid more for lower end vehicles and got lesser vehicles for their purchase. In other words the net effect of the vouchers was a higher end cost for a lower end value, because there was less haggling in the market on trade-in values and new car values. Buyers would have been better off without the vouchers, without the 'help', gotten cars for less money and better value. To balance that people purchased cars below what they normally would have gotten which did help banks, somewhat, but removed market incentive to do more for less.

Good job!

And today we find out that there are some minor problems at another place, this at WSJ 18 SEP 2009:

WASHINGTON -- Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. Chairman Sheila Bair said Friday her agency may tap its $500 billion credit line with the U.S. Treasury to replenish its deposit insurance fund, though she appeared cautious about doing so.
"We are carefully considering all options" including borrowing from the Treasury, Ms. Bair said Friday after a speech in Washington.
Ms. Bair has already warned banks that they may face an assessment increase to bolster the fund. Friday, she said there are also other little-known options available to the agency, including requiring banks to prepay assessments. The FDIC board of directors will meet at the end of this month to consider how to replenish the fund, she said.
Ms. Bair appeared cautious about resorting to the Treasury credit line, saying there are different views on when it should be used. She said some believe it should be reserved for emergencies only, rather than for covering losses that are already known.
Congress acted earlier this year to allow the FDIC to borrow as much as $500 billion from the Treasury if the Treasury, the Federal Reserve and the White House believe it is warranted. Otherwise, the agency can borrow up to $100 billion.

So let me get this straight:

We have major problems in the mortgage market that go unaddressed to stop giving out mortgages to those who can't afford them.
We have the two federally backed mortgage groups losing money, even with cash infusions and playing with the derivatives market.
We have the FHA dropping below its minimal required cash reserve levels, which should mean that it will stop handing out cash but, instead, will seek to put good money after bad.
We have just one group that helped stimulate all these loans finally getting some scrutiny nearly a decade after the regulations were loosened under the Clinton Administration.
We have a federal program which ends up costing the consumers money in order to get federal largesse to trade in cars.
We have the FDIC, that much vaunted institution that everyone always points to as the one great good of the FDR Administration now pointing out that it is running out of money to cover depositors.

The 'We' is you, me and every other citizen of the United States.

That is our cash they are playing with, and treating our hard earned money as play money.

Mind you this was all done with federal regulations and the close observation of federal regulators and 'oversight' by the swell minded idiots Upon the Hill. No one can complain that there weren't ENOUGH regulations as it was the regulations that caused these problems IN THE FIRST PLACE.

And now that 'We' are still in a recession, with high unemployment rate, these bozos Upon the Hill refuse to STOP playing with our money and start addressing the problems that has been caused by our elected representatives in the House, Senate and White House for decades. Thus they are lengthening and deepening the recession and just as 'We' begin to get a little economic footing under us, the bill for all that lovely government spending comes due and that will get us a devalued currency with inflation, to boot. To pay out all that money will require a huge cash infusion into the system over the next few years just to cover the debt that our government has put into place. Plus the hugely expanded deficit that will then kick into high gear about 5-6 years down the road when the huge amounts of interest on all that lovely new debt comes due for us to pay out. That being 'We'.

We the People.

We have an agreement.

This is not forming a more perfect Union.

The agreement is being violated.

This government, even if it changed over to Republican majorities overnight, would leave the Nation with a huge debt, climbing deficits, and, as Republicans are so fiscally management oriented, with a political class that will want to KEEP the new status quo of spending.

That is a Charlie Foxtrot no matter which way you go.

The last time Democrats had any concept of fiscal sobriety was in the 19th century.

For Republicans that last time was in the early 20th, probably around the Taft Administration.

The much vaunted two party system is SOS.

Stuck on Stupid.

Both parties, without exception.

They can't even recognize that before spending on 'shovel ready' things they need to spend on 'hole ready' things, because the holes already exist and they need to be filled and closed off so that the filling doesn't melt away.

Our swell Ignoramuses Upon the Hill can't figure that out.

We have a problem when our government will not do things necessary to get out of our way so that We may build a more perfect Union.

Activism FOR more government regulation and control has purchased us this problem. It is the problem, not a solution.

So if more government is not the solution, then how about less of it?

Or are we afraid to build our more perfect Union with less government and more from ourselves?

Just how much do you fear that face that looks back at you in the mirror?

Just how much do you want to be controlled by government?

This isn't about other people and helping them, it is about you and you giving up your voice, your money, your liberty and your freedom to those that don't give a damn about you. Do you really want someone else to take a major role in deciding if you live or die, and that can change with a misfiling of a form? An accidentally dropped number?

Are you a number?

Or are you a person?

On 9/11/01 I was...

2009-09-11T18:17:00.002-04:00

... suffering back spasms. It was 09 SEP 2001, TUE and I had started my day being barely able to get out of bed, hobble down the stairs, make myself breakfast, take care of our cats and then relax so muscle relaxants could do their thing.

I remember my lady calling me into the living room to watch, in horror, the smoke rising from the upper floors of the first WTC building hit.

Then the reports about the Pentagon.

Spurious reports going on in DC, particularly about the State Dept.

Then the second WTC plane hit, and I remember the fireball it blasted out the other side of the building.

Minutes, mere minutes.

Reports of something going on in the air and all the commercial and civilian activity being shut down, planes trying to find someplace to land...

Pennsylvania a jet down. All lives lost.

I received a call from my boss making sure I was all right.

I worked in a civilian agency in DoD. During the threatened shutdown in the '90s we were told who was important enough to come in to work without pay if it came to that. I was one of those who would do so.

An honor to volunteer to work supporting the warfighter and be accepted for that.

Our work sites in DC had been evacuated on 9/11.

My building was on the flight path of Flight 77.

There are many such targets for those diverting a plane to kill wantonly to instill terror. To instill fear. To enforce their will upon others and cow them into submission.

We would be closed for three days, with only a few designated for maintaining buildings coming in then quickly leaving, under the watchful eye of the National Guard.

I was in shock.

In horror.

And disgusted by those who would take such life on such scale without justification, cause or reason. No Nation did that to America, but armed fanatics enforcing their will upon the world.

When we did re-open, I asked to be put back into a direct support position that I had recently left.

Our citizen soldiers were going in harms way for us all.

Handing discs and satchels over to uniformed couriers heading directly out to the waiting forces who needed those before they left has ever been one of the most satisfying of my life.

In absolute pain due to my back.

It took me 20 minutes to walk the few hundred feet from a parking space to the building.

And 20 minutes back when my shift was over.

Whatever my pain, my physical problems, nothing would keep me from my job.

I remembered what had happened to our Embassies around the world and remember the fateful morning I drove past the CIA entrance in 1993. We were in the same business, but different lines of it and I considered those men and women to be on the front lines of a Private War declared upon us all. Working after 9/11 reminded us all about how our buildings had not had any real defensive obstacles put in place to stop truck bombers... nothing could stop those who stalked outside the fence, however.

We were all marked as we volunteered to work at a job to help defend the Nation.

I learned, some days later, that a man I had worked with, Mr. Dong Lee, was on Flight 77. He was a contractor who worked on contract for the US government. That, too, is a volunteer position: no one forces you to do that.

He was not a personal friend, nor even a professional one, but a man who I had contact with working on a large scale research project for my Agency. It was clear, to me, that his work was vital as part of our Nation's defenses after reviewing the work and what it meant. I had met him in late JUL 01. We would never get to work on that project.

I would volunteer for a medical study at NIH to test a new medication outside of its intended audience to see if it would help others with my condition, that being Type I Diabetes.

I did that because I remembered that in WWII those who could not or would not fight could still contribute and put their bodies to service for the Nation and their fellow man.

When I first heard the 'chickenhawk' slur I was profoundly disgusted with those putting it out.

You could contribute when not able to fight and must do so to support your Nation and your fellow man.

I would become gravely ill due to that study, although not due to the medication being tested, as fate would have it. From that I would no longer be able to do my job which was in Advanced R&D for my Agency. To find new and better ways to find our enemies and protect our Nation. I would survive, but would never have the skills and pointed mental capability that I did when I entered the study.

Even Pacifists did that during WWII and gained great honor for doing so, and gained high esteem for their morals, ethics and commitment to the Nation. Our modern critics of war are not so valiant, not so public spirited and don't seem to give a damn about the Nation to risk their health and their lives against medications and diseases.

I cannot hate those individuals.

I can only pity them for the dark void in their beings where their soul should be.

There is a cold, dark place in my heart for those attackers of my Nation and my fellow citizens who come from afar with malice aforethought and a red gleam in their eye.

And for those who impugn the volunteers who work to keep us safe and alive, I have disgust and pity.

And for those who wish to forgive our attackers and blame our Nation for what came to our shores I have no respect at all.

For just a few hours I thought that the Bush Administration 'got it'.

WANTED: DEAD OR ALIVE

I hoped that would stick with our elected officials.

It didn't.

You don't need mighty armies if you have a mighty people, but it is a happy benefit.

Armies and Navies are not a sovereign cure for the ill of those who return to a state of Nature to become enemies of all mankind.

We used to know what that sort of fighting was all about.

No longer.

We are civilized to the point of decadence: at a high state of decay.

When you reach for the stars, you had better prepare for a damned nasty knife fight by those that can't stand to see others succeed.

For those that strive, failure is an option.

Minoans, Mycenae, Troy, Hittites, Assyrians, Sparta, Egypt, Persia, Rome... all strived, all succeeded and all failed.

America is born of failure because we are not perfect as a people, but we do have a perfect mission.

We have wars to fight so we can end them, and enemies hiding in many Nations and lawless regions across the globe.

Yet we are no longer fighting to win.

So that we can end the fighting and get back to relative peace.

To do that can require a decade and more once the fighting stops.

Now we have an entire section of people who are terrified of winning.

There are long term consequences to defeat.

I will never forgive those who brought war to our shores on 9/11/01.

And I will never forget the loss of my fellow citizens and those who trusted us to protect them in our Nation against those barbaric foes.

Never forgive.

Never forget.

Medical care and Federalism

2009-09-09T08:56:00.001-04:00

The concept of the United States is that we live with a federal system, a system of multiple governments each addressing the areas that they are given to address and conforming to the representative system that provides citizen input into that level of government. To find out where medical care should be addressed, the outlay of powers is given in the US Constitution in broad context, to reserve a very few areas for the National level so that there is continuity as a Nation on these few items.

Those who have been pushing 'the public option' or 'single payer plan' run into the problem of monopsony where there is but a single payer in a given market. When one purchaser has an overwhelming or sole presence in the market for any good or service, it has untoward market power to demand pricing acceptable to it by varying how much of those things it is willing to buy so as to establish an acceptable price point to the monopsonist. Such markets can be static or dynamic, and can include such things as: the labor market, welfare causing a change in the rate of exploitation as compared to a competitive market, minimum wage, and other areas where competition drives costs down so as to gain more market share. Any National government does have, within its power, to create a monopoly position by granting such a monopoly to a private concern, although this was discouraged as far back as Adam Smith who pointed out that only in those areas of National need (such as defense of the Nation, protection of critical labor skills, etc.) should that be done.

On economic ground I, too, had examined a monopsony use for medications, not medical practice, but have been dissuaded from that by the cogent analysis of other writers. Indeed I was unaware of the term monopsony until it was explained, then the problems of it became self-evident in that it restricts market efficiencies to provide the greatest number of goods and services from multiple competing agents seeking multiple competing buyers so as to properly value a given good or service until such time as innovation changes the price point for that within the market. The elimination of the multiple purchasers is just as, if not to some degree far worse, than having monopoly or oligopoly in which sellers fixing prices seek to maximize their profit in uneconomic ways.

Beyond that, however, is the much abused 'commerce clause' of the US Constitution along with the 'general welfare' clause in Article I, Section 8, in parts which are separate listings:

The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States;

[..]

To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes;

[..]

The 'general Welfare' clause is in regards to taxes, duties, imposts and excises that go into the general treasury to pay for our common defense and the federal government's other activities. It is not a separate power in and of itself to the general welfare but a reason why these fund sources are to be used and what they are to be used for: paying for the other items in the federal government, not for some vague generalization of 'general Welfare'. All the other things in the federal government are part of the 'general Welfare' but are a discreet subset of the entire general Welfare of the People, as written in the Preamble. That clause is about taxes, duties, etc., things that we call 'revenue', not about the provisioning of goods and services.

In the 'Commerce clause' we get three distinct areas that the federal government is to play a role: in commerce with foreign Nations, amongst the States and with the Indian Tribes. The 'regulate' is to regularize, not dictate to others what to do and how to do it. If these three items (foreign Nations, the States and the Indian Tribes) must have logical connection to each other and the power described. That power is one that seeks to work with autonomous and independent, indeed Sovereign, units so as to create agreement amongst those in negotiations to regularize the way commerce is conducted. As a Sovereign power cannot dictate terms of a civil treaty with an equal, the federal government cannot do so with the States and the Indian Tribes. If these things did not act in a similar manner they would be called out separately in the Constitution and provided for with their own clauses as was done with taxation and other revenues.

This power has been abused by the federal government to reach into individual States, individual markets and exercise power and influence in those markets without consent of the State Legislatures and Governors who are at the level of office of Sovereignty for their States as that of the head of foreign Nations and Indian Tribes. The Raich decision is one in a long series of expansions of federal power into areas it is not given to work in and attempting to tell the States how they must comply with federal regulations in a venue where the federal government has no given power to it.

That we know by two Amendments to the US Constitution that tell exactly what those things not specifically handed to the federal government are:

Amendment IX

The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

Amendment X

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

If it is not handed to the federal government, then the rights and power are retained by the people and may be exercised by the States or the people as they choose amongst their States. Thus the federal government retains no monopoly or monopsony power over medical care. What the federal government CAN do is encourage the States to work with each other to set up their own methods of providing these things, but the States are on the hook for that and there is no compelling any State to do what it does not wish to do in that realm.

No matter how 'good' it might be for the federal government to do anything outside of its given powers, it is powerless to do so: it is not handed those powers and can only be given them by Amendment.

Thus I can see no place for even such things as Medicair or Medicaid save as voluntary acceptance, at best, of government largesse. Already that market presence distorts the market, causes problems with the subsidies provided to citizens on the cost of treatment for them by creating uneconomical price points that are not market driven but cost driven. When a good or service is subsidized, either by setting abnormally low prices and paying producers directly (such as in State owned ventures seen in other Nations) or via subsidy to purchasers, we find imbalance in the system that tries to adjust to these non-market based drivers that then inflate the cost or artificially hold the cost low with detriment to infrastructure and encouraging new market competition. Other treatment venues that are held by the federal government, namely the VA system and Indian health services system, provide medical care that is not high quality, not in enough supply and treats patients in a sub-optimal manner as there is no incentive to treat them better.

Trying to get rid of a part of a system that works to model it on failed systems is not a pathway to success, but to failure.

When people talk about the 'failure of the health system' in the US, it is due to the very federal interventions that were supposed to 'help' and 'fix' the system, and yet these initiatives have had just the opposite outcome in neither 'helping' nor 'fixing' the problems they set out to fix. Worse, still, is that by concentrating administrative power in a sole or oligarchical arrangement, lobbying then can be concentrated at one or a very few points by companies seeking greater income and wealth in the system. The very same people who decry the current influence of Big Pharma and Big Insurance on government legislation should want just the opposite of a 'single payer' or 'public option' as this then concentrates the ability of those organizations to lobby and further change the system to their benefit. This is strangely not understood by those that advocate that sort of system and yet want less lobbying power and influence.

Now if you follow this line of reasoning, keeping 'good wishes' and 'nice things' out of the picture because they are not part of the described power structure of the Union granted to the federal government but reserved by the people to use as they wish in the States, we get a major point of departure from the Left but also on the Right.

How so?

This system, that keeps the federal government out of doing things actively, also describes the market arrangement for those things outside of the federal purview.

First it is market driven, with little to no interference from federal government.

Second it is of the concern of the people and the States.

Thus from the first and the second, there is no 'national market' in health care services or their provisioning, but a large number of State and local markets.

To understand the problem of this on the Right, I will turn to Grace-Marie Turner in an article on the 27 AUG 2008 at the Wall Street Journal on this topic of a 'National Market':

States should be giving residents more options to buy policies that suit their budgets, not the priorities of politicians. Rep. John Shadegg, a Republican from Arizona, has proposed federal legislation that would allow people to buy health insurance across state lines.

But Congress could do more than simply knocking down the barriers to interstate health insurance. For starters, it could make health insurance more portable. One way to do that would be to change the tax subsidies already going to those who get health insurance at work and turn them into refundable tax credits. This would make the subsidies available to everyone, and help millions of people buy coverage who can't afford it now. It would also help people keep their health insurance when they lose their jobs or move.

Freeing Americans to buy health insurance across state lines would give people more choices in health care. And giving individuals a direct tax break for purchasing coverage would put armies of consumers to work to find affordable policies. That would force states to lighten their regulations or lose out to other, less regulated states.

The complex problems in our health sector are best cured by a bigger dose of market competition, not more government intervention.

In that first cited paragraph my problem with the Progressive Right is in clear view: the government has NO ROLE in creating a 'National Market' unless the States agree to it and the federal government cannot 'allow' people to purchase services when their States have already had their say in things. From that first intervention we now get the fine idea in the second paragraph that the federal government should over-rule the States to provide 'nice things' for individuals who are going from State to State with the express reason of taking up residence in a State more to their liking for either economic, social or other reasons. And how will this be supported?

SUBSIDIES!

Free money to EVERYONE!

What could possibly go wrong here, right?

Yes, let us further inflate the system so that people cannot take advantage of their new position with the costs inherent in any such a move because they want to move and can weigh the risks and benefits on their own. Yes, let us overburden the system yet still more, no? Perhaps this will be Medirelocair? Medimoveade?

What the hell is up with these people?

The reason that these are discrete markets under the control of the people and the States is that is the way the system is designed from the outset.

Believe it or not a Nation with far more people runs in this way without much in the way of intervention from the National end of things. It is also the largest representative democracy on the planet: India. Hey! If we are supposed to look overseas for good practices, like the Left so often wants, then how about examining India's medical system and seeing just how and why it works with little government overhead? We might be able to provide more care, at lower costs and with better quality... but then neither the Left nor the Right likes the idea that power should be in YOUR HANDS and not in THEIRS.

If you truly want a better health care system you must: remove the 'oversight' from government, remove the subsidies for insurance, end the current system for new entrants and allow those already in them to either receive a lump sum cash payout or continue the system in a declining state as it loses individuals in it, and take the huge hit to our economy that comes from doing something wrong-headed and driving a once working system to insolvency by 'helping' it from the federal end of things.

So, to the Left: why do you want to concentrate power and the power of lobbying over our government at the cost of the citizenry?

And to the Right: just why do you want to expand federal power, expand un-economic practices and refuse to look at market based and consumer driven alternatives that actually work in other places?

Just why are both 'sides' of the political spectrum so enamored of more National power?

And just why don't they trust the people, trust our States and stop messing up with a system after their 'fixes' make the problem deeper and worse?

But then I am neither on the Left nor the Right, but a free man looking to see that our liberty is not trampled by those willing to take away necessary liberty for ephemeral security of health care by National fiat.

Double Standards: GC and the press

2009-09-04T14:48:00.001-04:00

From my previous work on The Volunteer Fifth Column I cited the following:

8) On 19 OCT 2006 CNN has decided to become the anti-American outlet of choice for Iraqi insurgents and terrorists. That is when they decided that to 'tell the other side of the story' in Iraq meant showing the murder of a US soldier via sniper fire. This was *not* a military assault, but a pre-planned and executed murder of a US soldier for propaganda video footage. CNN has refused to call it such or to even indicate that it is an evidentiary piece for war crimes as the showing of such is actually against the Geneva Conventions. In previous eras that would be considered activity worthy of a War Crimes tribunal for those involved. Strange how so many are ready to call for that for US soldiers in combat and *not* for those publicizing the murders of US soldiers.

Joining CNN in this category is the New York Times with its running of a video showing the death of Staff Sgt. Hector Leija as reported by Gateway Pundit on 03 FEB 2007 due to the uproar over the Stars & Stripes first report on this by the NYT. Not only did they not go via their own codes of conduct and respect for the family of a fallen serviceman. By doing neither and showing such video, the NYT is also liable for War Crimes prosecution by abrogating the Geneva Conventions on the treatment of the wounded and dead of lawful combatants.

Because of the lax attitude towards holding anyone accountable for any actions, I doubt that either organization will be brought up on charges. Specifically under the following:

Convention IV
Relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War, 12 August 1949.
Part I. General Provisions
...
Art. 5 Where in the territory of a Party to the conflict, the latter is satisfied that an individual protected person is definitely suspected of or engaged in activities hostile to the security of the State, such individual person shall not be entitled to claim such rights and privileges under the present Convention as would, if exercised in the favour of such individual person, be prejudicial to the security of such State.

Where in occupied territory an individual protected person is detained as a spy or saboteur, or as a person under definite suspicion of activity hostile to the security of the Occupying Power, such person shall, in those cases where absolute military security so requires, be regarded as having forfeited rights of communication under the present Convention.

In each case, such persons shall nevertheless be treated with humanity and, in case of trial, shall not be deprived of the rights of fair and regular trial prescribed by the present Convention. They shall also be granted the full rights and privileges of a protected person under the present Convention at the earliest date consistent with the security of the State or Occupying Power, as the case may be.

The use and reporting of actual sniper fire to kill a lawful combatant by individuals not affiliated with the Armed Forces of the High Contracting Powers or of those that would be considered to be equivalent in a civil war from the opposing side are considered to be neutral unless they take part in activities AGAINST said lawful combatants. Thus, by using such coverage and not clearing it with the lawful Armed Forces command structure and publicizing it in a manner that is against any High Contracting Power or equivalent, the neutrality is abrogated and LOST.
Further in the same Convention:

Part III. Status and Treatment of Protected Persons
Section III. Occupied territories

Art. 68. Protected persons who commit an offence which is solely intended to harm the Occupying Power, but which does not constitute an attempt on the life or limb of members of the occupying forces or administration, nor a grave collective danger, nor seriously damage the property of the occupying forces or administration or the installations used by them, shall be liable to internment or simple imprisonment, provided the duration of such internment or imprisonment is proportionate to the offence committed. Furthermore, internment or imprisonment shall, for such offences, be the only measure adopted for depriving protected persons of liberty. The courts provided for under Article 66 of the present Convention may at their discretion convert a sentence of imprisonment to one of internment for the same period.
The penal provisions promulgated by the Occupying Power in accordance with Articles 64 and 65 may impose the death penalty against a protected person only in cases where the person is guilty of espionage, of serious acts of sabotage against the military installations of the Occupying Power or of intentional offences which have caused the death of one or more persons, provided that such offences were punishable by death under the law of the occupied territory in force before the occupation began.

The death penalty may not be pronounced against a protected person unless the attention of the court has been particularly called to the fact that since the accused is not a national of the Occupying Power, he is not bound to it by any duty of allegiance.

In any case, the death penalty may not be pronounced on a protected person who was under eighteen years of age at the time of the offence.

Now Iraq is not being occupied unless reporting is being done from a viewpoint of presenting "the other side's view" - which is that the US is 'occupying' Iraq. Promulgating that storyline can either be done in context of the US is helping a Free Iraq, and the sniping is an illegal activity that they are reporting upon and are, thusly, under all laws of Iraq that cover such reporting or that those doing the reporting for the presentation of such violence in the light of the insurgents agree that Iraq is 'occupied' and thus such reporting falls under that of 'occupied territory'. So the first case makes these news organizations liable to the civil criminal codes of Iraq for this, but this is also combat against an insurgent force. Mind you, if you push the 'Occupied Iraq' concept, then the folks doing this should be summarily charged and imprisoned under the UCMJ. But I suspect they wouldn't like being in Gitmo. In which case that brings us to the dead and wounded Geneva Convention. This brings us to:

Convention I
For the Amelioration of the Condition of the Wounded and Sick in Armed Forces in the Field, Geneva, 12 August 1949
...
Chapter II. Wounded and Sick

Art. 12. Members of the armed forces and other persons mentioned in the following Article, who are wounded or sick, shall be respected and protected in all circumstances.
They shall be treated humanely and cared for by the Party to the conflict in whose power they may be, without any adverse distinction founded on sex, race, nationality, religion, political opinions, or any other similar criteria. Any attempts upon their lives, or violence to their persons, shall be strictly prohibited; in particular, they shall not be murdered or exterminated, subjected to torture or to biological experiments; they shall not wilfully be left without medical assistance and care, nor shall conditions exposing them to contagion or infection be created.
[Parts applying to urgent medical treatment ommitted]

Art. 13. The present Convention shall apply to the wounded and sick belonging to the following categories:

(1) Members of the armed forces of a Party to the conflict, as well as members of militias or volunteer corps forming part of such armed forces. (2) Members of other militias and members of other volunteer corps, including those of organized resistance movements, belonging to a Party to the conflict and operating in or outside their own territory, even if this territory is occupied, provided that such militias or volunteer corps, including such organized resistance movements, fulfil the following conditions: (a) that of being commanded by a person responsible for his subordinates; (b) that of having a fixed distinctive sign recognizable at a distance; (c) that of carrying arms openly; (d) that of conducting their operations in accordance with the laws and customs of war. (3) Members of regular armed forces who profess allegiance to a Government or an authority not recognized by the Detaining Power. (4) Persons who accompany the armed forces without actually being members thereof, such as civil members of military aircraft crews, war correspondents, supply contractors, members of labour units or of services responsible for the welfare of the armed forces, provided that they have received authorization from the armed forces which they accompany. (5) Members of crews, including masters, pilots and apprentices, of the merchant marine and the crews of civil aircraft of the Parties to the conflict, who do not benefit by more favourable treatment under any other provisions in international law. (6) Inhabitants of a non-occupied territory, who on the approach of the enemy, spontaneously take up arms to resist the invading forces, without having had time to form themselves into regular armed units, provided they carry arms openly and respect the laws and customs of war.

...

Art. 17. Parties to the conflict shall ensure that burial or cremation of the dead, carried out individually as far as circumstances permit, is preceded by a careful examination, if possible by a medical examination, of the bodies, with a view to confirming death, establishing identity and enabling a report to be made. One half of the double identity disc, or the identity disc itself if it is a single disc, should remain on the body.

Bodies shall not be cremated except for imperative reasons of hygiene or for motives based on the religion of the deceased. In case of cremation, the circumstances and reasons for cremation shall be stated in detail in the death certificate or on the authenticated list of the dead.
They shall further ensure that the dead are honourably interred, if possible according to the rites of the religion to which they belonged, that their graves are respected, grouped if possible according to the nationality of the deceased, properly maintained and marked so that they may always be found. For this purpose, they shall organize at the commencement of hostilities an Official Graves Registration Service, to allow subsequent exhumations and to ensure the identification of bodies, whatever the site of the graves, and the possible transportation to the home country. These provisions shall likewise apply to the ashes, which shall be kept by the Graves Registration Service until proper disposal thereof in accordance with the wishes of the home country.

Thus the wounded and dead due to sniper fire are to be treated honorably throughout the entire procedure from event to interment in the grave for the dead. Not going through proper military channels on any and all events of wounding and killing that are recorded and propagating them without military authorization is an act against the State or High Contracting Power or equivalent. That reporting removes all protection of the Geneva Conventions from those doing such reporting on the dead and wounded encountered against an insurgent force IN ADDITION to the local laws. I find such reporting to be absolutely reprehensible by ANY news organization and cannot see how they can ethically justify such as doing so puts them in contradiction of the honorable treatment of the dead and wounded. Both CNN and New York Times do not treat the dead and wounded honorably by their use of film to show partisan views of such events and are considered to be working outside of normal military channels against the Nation of those being wounded and killed, in this case the United States.

Why they are not under indictment under the Geneva Conventions or treated as espionage agencies is beyond me. The use of such is a War Crime by any definition and doing so to harm a State is against the Geneva Conventions and makes one working for the enemy of the State that is being targeted for such coverage.

When I hear all the blather from 'journalists' about the Geneva Convention and terrorists, I do, indeed, ask myself: why are they not raising a holy furor about these people violating not only journalistic standards but the laws of war? By violating such standards 'journalists' lose their 'protected persons' status.

You do not show images, video or anything about the dead, sick or wounded on the battlefield unless it is first approved of by the powers in question who are within that territory during the time of your stay there. While the US is fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan under orders from the Executive Branch carrying out the will of the Legislative Branch, the rule of law in those areas where US forces operate ARE the laws of war. When a soldier is wounded or sick, they become a protected person under the GC and need the greatest protection from harm, abuse and exploitation possible.

Even with the AP already a member of The Volunteer Fifth Column, it now gets moved up a notch from mere mis-reporting and fauxtography to absolutely contravened activity. The AP has now shown the image of a fallen soldier after receiving orders from Defense Secretary Gates,as seen at Blackfive reporting from Politico:

Defense Secretary Robert Gates is objecting “in the strongest terms” to an Associated Press decision to transmit a photograph showing a mortally wounded 21-year-old Marine in his final moments of life, calling the decision “appalling” and a breach of “common decency.”

The AP reported that the Marine’s father had asked – in an interview and in a follow-up phone call — that the image, taken by an embedded photographer, not be published.

AP reported in a story that it decided to make the image public anyway because it “conveys the grimness of war and the sacrifice of young men and women fighting it.”

The photo shows Lance Cpl. Joshua M. Bernard of New Portland, Maine, who was struck by a rocket-propelled grenade in a Taliban ambush Aug. 14 in Helmand province of southern Afghanistan, according to The AP.

Gates wrote to Thomas Curley, AP’s president and chief executive officer. “Out of respect for his family’s wishes, I ask you in the strongest of terms to reconsider your decision. I do not make this request lightly. In one of my first public statements as Secretary of Defense, I stated that the media should not be treated as the enemy, and made it a point to thank journalists for revealing problems that need to be fixed – as was the case with Walter Reed.

“I cannot imagine the pain and suffering Lance Corporal Bernard’s death has caused his family. Why your organization would purposefully defy the family’s wishes knowing full well that it will lead to yet more anguish is beyond me. Your lack of compassion and common sense in choosing to put this image of their maimed and stricken child on the front page of multiple American newspapers is appalling. The issue here is not law, policy or constitutional right – but judgment and common decency.”

Neither the SECDEF nor the family of Lance Cpl. Joshua M. Bernard wanted the image of him splashed on newspapers around the world. There is decency for the dead in wartime and when the SECDEF 'asks' he is telling you that you can't do that as we have seen from the Geneva Conventions.

There is no equivalency between those who are fighting for no Nation utilizing their full liberty of Private War and having no command structure over them, no accountability and following none of the laws of war, to those that wear a uniform, are accountable, fight for a Nation, under a legitimate declaration of war, and are in a war zone. No moral equivalency between the two. When you splash the picture of a dead soldier that the SECDEF and the soldier's family have asked you not to publish you are not liable for a mere lawsuit.

You are liable to be tried for espionage under a military tribunal and shot if found guilty.

It is a war crime.

Not a civil crime, not due to the civil justice system, not a mere criminal penalty, but one of the highest crimes of war recognized for over a century. No excuse can be put forward for doing that to any lawful combatant.

Ever.

That is why getting adjudged an unlawful combatant is vital: it tells you what to do with those who aren't fighting under the recognized, civilized, laws of war.

I expect the Left to make all sorts of moralizations, if they even care about the laws of war as something other than mere talking points to misconstrue and bash the US with. Then to use that misconstrued logic to perform their own heinous offenses against the sensibilities of all civilized people who recognize the laws of war.

Which our enemies DON'T.

There is accountability with being civilized and having laws you adhere to.

When you contravene them you are due a penalty.

I expect that penalty to be paid in a military court as that is the jurisdiction involved.

If someone would just get the guts to charge these scum for doing these actions and showing our brave soldiers images when they have been killed by those who follow no laws of war whatsoever. Luckily the family was involved, too, so they didn't get a first notification via opening the front page of a newspaper and seeing their dead son on it.

Rise of the Ghouls

2009-08-28T11:28:00.001-04:00

To honor the dead one must, indeed, respect the time of their passing and give latitude towards those in grief so that they may properly mourn the deceased. While I had very few points of agreement with the late Sen. Ted Kennedy I do respect and honor the dead.

For those who attempt to exploit his death for purely partisan means, to add his name to this bill or that project, I have the same answer as to those who were putting President Reagan's name on so many things: I remember when a wait past a person's death by a decade or more before doing so was customary so that we could, truly, appreciate if a man was dues such memorials and honors. A small shrine is one thing, as it gives a central point for mourning and remembrance. Use of public power to anoint that name upon bills or structures is another. It is ghoulish to do so for purely partisan reasons, and those who want such things are doing no honor to the person involved or their Nation. I do not like it for people still alive, as is done with so many pieces of pork legislation, nor for those recently deceased without giving the public time to determine if an individual is truly great for all generations to remember, or just of passing fame. If truly great, then a decade will not matter as a permanent spot would be given in history. And if not, then there has been waste of time and effort and others that could be memorialized were not to get such passing fame put in place. I have called the unhealthy fascination with the late President Reagan as an individual a form of 'necrophilia' and it is when a party tries to put forth the star power of a dead individual and ignore his policies that he put forward to get him to office. The concentration on the charisma, although fine for Hollywood gossip columnists, is an unhealthy thing for a political party in a republic.

When those who eulogize the dead do not weigh the good and ill of the life of the deceased, I know that I am hearing not only well wishing and not wanting to speak ill of the dead, but the inability to say those negative things and say that they were part of an entire man, and that if we exalt the good then we must also come to terms with the bad. For such legislation that he got passed that helped the Nation, Sen. Kennedy deserves our respect, honor and gratitude. For leaving a young woman to die in icy waters trapped in a car and seeking no help to rescue her, he deserves our incredulity, disdain and serves as an object lesson of how not to act as a person, as a man. These can be weighed, the good and bad both spoken, and say that the sum of this man's life was that of a flawed man, imperfect in many ways, laudable in some, but that of a man, nonetheless. He would not face civil justice nor judgment for what he did and used power and influence to escape it, and that is the mark of no Lion at all but of frail, imperfect man who sets himself above the law by his actions.

To leave a person who trusts you to die without seeking as much aid as possible TO help, is dishonorable in the extreme. To suffer no justice for it, and account for yourself is to set yourself above society and its law, and that is not the act of a citizen, but of aristocracy, royalty and nobility. Save that under Common Law there is no one who is not to hold themselves to account for their actions under the law. That corrosive effect of using power, wealth and influence to escape justice not only sets one apart from the law, but degrades the law for all citizens. What is the use of making good laws if those making them feel they are immune to its actions? Sen. Kennedy, in that instance, demonstrated why the law is necessary for all people: the powerful can use that power to escape it and get away with acts that no ordinary man could do. What one gains is not fame and respect, but infamy and disgrace.

No good law can make up for that when put down by the very one that seeks to escape its scrutiny. No representative democracy can last long when the lawmakers set themselves above the law. In that Sen. Kennedy was but an indicator of the wider corruption in the legislative branch, which has seen fit to exempt themselves from many laws that the rest of the public must abide by. Those that seek to distract from the rot they feed on, to laud one who had active disdain for the law as a legislator, they, too, are Ghouls feasting upon the corruption of the public body and saying how good such rot is as they ingest it.

The US Justice Dept goes after the CIA and those in charge raise no fears of what this will do. Fault lies in the fact that the CIA is a civilian entity given needs that, before our modern time, were carried out by the military either overt or covert. When a Japanese Admiral came to espy Pearl Harbor he did so quite openly, and none molested him. Espionage has ever been a game played by Nations and many who were not of any military were recruited and put into harms way to gather INTEL. And for that they would fall under both civil and military law and understand that what would garner them a prison sentence at home would garner them a death sentence from our enemies. When we ask our citizens to go 'undercover' during any war, we are asking if they want to die for us in what they are doing, for the very act OF espionage DURING wartime is a DEATH SENTENCE when captured.

Our modern enemies, these that fight Private War against our Nation, they do not abide by any law and put themselves above all law to say that they will determine the fate of all mankind. They say so. Openly. Repeatedly.

The Law of Nature is that which is in all of us as we are all creatures of Nature. When we create society we learn to put our negative liberties to use to protect us from Nature and those other societies that mean us no good. There is no benefit to keeping them, as one man would then be able to set all of his people to war on a whim. We regularize this process, gain input from society, weigh matters of war and peace and let our representatives know where we stand and they speak for us. Governments represent their societies even when that society has no say in that government: Kings and Emperors all acknowledge this. Under the way of the Common Law do we hold these actions accountable to the people so that no leader, no King, no President in a Common Law system is above the Law and neither is any Legislative body. So to are all the organs of government responsible to the society that they are part of for the limited powers they are granted.

I have heard much of how our society will fall from grace nearly instantly if we do not bend over backwards to treat these ones waging Private War under civil courts. Their activities put them at risk for two forms of justice: military and civil. That is no 'double jeopardy' as their actions fall into both realms and each has different distinguishing characteristics to them. The civil law concentrates on civil society and protections via due process of law: the accused has the right to a jury trial and the full protections under civil law.

Military law is a different realm, however, and it is not one of evidence gathering and weighing rights versus liberty. It is weighing actions versus the protection of the entire Nation, of society and all its organs as an entire thing. This is not the realm of 'international law', either, although it can play some role in this. We pursue military ends when the civil means have fallen far short for our needs. They have fallen far short.

In 1993 Mir Amal Kansi would murder CIA employees as they waited at a signal to turn into the CIA facility in Virginia. We treated this as a mere civil mass murder, not as an act of warfare upon our Nation's civil servants. We were wrong to do so. We would pay a price for that.

In 1993 the World Trade Center was bombed by an alliance of Islamic Radicals. We pursued it as a civil matter and that did not put an end to these groups or their actions. We were wrong to think that a bombing done as a military action deserved civil response. And we would pay for that oversight.

In 1993 the attempted Landmarks Bombing plot was found to be run by one of the men held in civil jail for the WTC bombing. Through good luck we found out about it before it happened. If he was in military custody as having waged Private War against us, he would not have been able to do so. He would subvert his lawyer to help his cause. The price paid for not treating him as one waging Private War goes on, to this day.

In 1996 we would see our military personnel attacked not once, but twice by Private War groups. Saudi Arabia would drag its feet in helping us when we made that a civil matter, and then sequester one of the known operatives from us and execute him. For his attack upon their soil, they had every right to do so. As they had openly hosted the US forces in their Nation, they did not allow our Nation to find out the perpetrators so we could respond militarily to this military attack. For that perfidy and lack of hospitality on the part of Saudi Arabia, we would pay, and pay dearly.

In 1998 our Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were bombed. We did not treat this as any Nation should, as an act of war upon sovereign soil in extraterritorial enclaves. Embassies are foreign soil and this is understood going back more than 2000 years. As it is guarded by the US Marine Corps, it is an attack upon our military. We would treat this as a civil crime and not the acts of war that they were and are for all those that attack Embassies of any Nation. We would pay for that when that President would not ask Congress to declare that organization to be at Private War with us, so that we could respond openly, freely and make our objectives clear. We would pay for that with ineffectual responses and in more blood.

In 2000 one of our warships, the USS Cole, with open access to the High Seas was brazenly bombed in an act of war. The US has never responded in an effective manner to this act of brazen Piracy which is Private War. We would pay for that.

In 2000 a Private War group was found to have set a bomb in place to assassinate President Clinton. By placing that device to attack the Head of State of a Foreign Nation with military means, we wouldn't take much action at all, civil or military. We had been working long years to get at that organization and its deep links with transnational organized crime and transnational terrorism was putting people in many Nations at risk. We would pay for that weakness.

Stretching far back into the 1960's when the PLO and FARC and other Private War groups started up, all the way to the present with just one exception, the United States has always wanted to deal with these organizations as a civil matter. We had been losing not just military personnel, although that has been horrific in its long-term toll, but we have lost CIA personnel, civilians in government unaffiliated with DoD or the CIA, private contract personnel domestic and foreign, oil workers, farmers, teachers, clergy of many denominations and religions, aid workers, doctors, nurses, the fit and the disabled, and just plain tourists seeking to find out more about foreign lands and paying the ultimate price in a war declared upon them that our government deigns not to recognize.

Those that declare such Private War are NOT mere Public Enemies, and we treat them like that at our peril.

They follow no civilized rules of warfare. They establish no prison camps nor allow neutral parties to examine their captives. They have no accountable State structure over them, to hold them to account for any action. They do more than 'just' terrorize: they loot, rob, kill, rape, plunder, and attack any they wish to for any reason they want or no reason at all. When civilized man reclaims all his rights and liberties granted to him under the Law of Nature, he is far worse than any beast or animal. Beasts and animals have no choice as to their lot in life, they have few decisions save kill or be killed. Living in Nature, red of tooth and claw, is all they have and they utilize what rudimentary abilities they have so as to protect themselves in life.

Terrorists are not beasts, though they reclaim all the beastly rights and liberty to themselves once more.

They actively step away from civilization, disdain civilization, attack civilization and seek to be the sole lords over everyone and everything. No tract they put out will make them a Nation or State until they actually work hard to establish laws for themselves that they will be held accountable to, and then put down a flag, put on a uniform and openly protect this society they are forming. We recognize them as humans only in form, not in humanity. They wage war without oversight, accountability or any thought save to intimidate and kill their way to Conquest without Mercy.

What we have in the Laws of War are very, very succinct: these ones are not due anything more than the determination of their status. Their status, as in all civilized realms, determines their fate. When they declare war upon us on their own with no backing from any Nation nor State, and declare that upon ANY NATION ON THIS EARTH they then declare their hostility to ALL NATIONS. When they declare war, their status is set to be judged by the Laws of War upon the battlefield. When captured in civil settings they are Pirates, no matter the place of their action, be it upon the High Seas or dry land, their attacks set them aside from normal crimes and the only, singular, determination that matters is if they are part of that organization that has so declared war upon us or if they do so as individuals. Under all military law up to our modern era, this determination was given in the battlefield by the active combatants and summary justice was delivered: no prisoners were taken save for INTEL needs and then, once that was done, they were executed as spies. In our land, on the civil side, the price for Piracy is rather low: Life Imprisonment.

CIA members who risk their lives to get INTEL from such beings are stepping into the area where man has renounced all civil authority over him, and trying to get information from those who have reclaimed all their rights and liberties that Nature gave them. My sole worry is for the health and well being of those men and women who step into that situation and that they come out whole and undamaged physically and mentally as they are stepping into a world far worse than that of any psychopathic killer. They step into the chaos of Nature and seek to wrest any scrap of information to save the lives of their fellow citizens. They pay a price in remorse for their actions and need for counseling and even having to step away from that work when the price to THEM becomes too high, and they risk themselves and their Nation by breaking down.

When one President gives sanction for this, and has duly informed Congress and another gives lip motions to support those agents and then sets another agency against those very same agents, that is the act of a Ghoul. Even when they have had misdeeds, even horrific ones, they have gotten our sanction via TWO Presidents. From all readings of the redacted IG report, the problems and abuses early on were addressed, the programs changed to have more accountability and include better information sharing to ensure that our men and women who had to get INTEL from those being held maintained their civilized stature. Of systemic abuses, we have seen none to date. Of accountable actions, keeping Congress informed, and acting in a civilized manner and adjusting the system to be held to HIGHER accountability, we have seen much.

This is not upholding the law unless there is PROOF of long-term deceit, misinformation, lack of oversight and treachery. To state that there has been any of that when all evidence, to date, points in the exact opposite direction, then leaves you in with the other Ghouls of Conspiracy theories.

Really, anyone who can run such a good conspiracy should be doing a better job running everything else, no?

And yet our minor problems are enlarged with the electron microscope so as to be made out to be civilization ending. And those who kill wantonly, without any law to back them? They get every excuse for their actions, which are to tear down the civilization that allows those who excuse them to live good lives. That is dishonorable to the overwhelming majority, indeed the near totality, of all those who serve this Nation and put themselves into harms way for us that act with honor and justice on their side. Forgiving mass murders is to invite more mass murder and to say that you do not value the lives of civilized man any more highly than that of those who have walked away from civilization. That is not a mark or honor of being civilized, but a mark of how uncivilized you are when you uphold those that fight Private War above those who are accountable to the law by placing themselves under it. To be unable to recognize that this most precious of voluntary associations is WILLING and that those UNWILLING are uncivilized misses the point of being civilized: to DISTINGUISH between the two and end the latter as they are a threat to all mankind. Which includes: you.

To do otherwise is to cruelly say that barbarism is civilized behavior and to invite worse and far worse, by doing so. That, too, is a rot within the body of our society, and has many feasting on it as well, who say this is good, this inability to distinguish. They wish the rot to spread and think themselves immune from it. And yet by consuming and spewing such rot far and wide they proclaim themselves as part of it and willing to be barbaric and support any barbaric action against those who hold themselves accountable to the law.

Then there is the attack that DID get a military response: 9/11.

A day when the hand of Private War reached out to end the lives of nearly 3,000 innocent people in a single day. Both civilian and military were killed, our Nations airspace put at peril, our transport system used against us, and a blatant act of war from a Private War group got a military response against those harboring them. Helping Pirates gets you 10 years. Becoming a Pirate gets you life. Thwarting civil justice gets you war when so many are killed.

This war started to shine a light on the dark web of connections between terrorists, 'Rogue Nations' and transnational organized crime. I've spent the last couple of years chronicling those links, those connections, and tracing them high up into the power structures of Nations. I haven't found that to be fun, but it has been extremely enlightening if not just down right horrifying.

When I find politicians in bed with thugs, killers, and transnational organized crime leaders I am horrified.

And that is just on the political 'Right'.

On the 'Left' I get to add terrorists and radical Marxists of various stripes. Even more fun is that some of the same individuals in the various underworlds support BOTH 'sides' of politics in America. There is a lovely neutrality of organized crime to politics, save when it threatens them directly, as Mussolini did the Sicilian Mafia. No one in the MSM or even the blogosphere really has seemed to step up to the plate on this for politics, but that is due to the uncomfortable ties between politicians, businesses, and organized crime. The few individuals who do that are standouts, and I applaud them, mightily. Now if only those on the 'Left' who try to say those on the 'Right' are in the thrall of corporations would ever bother to look at their OWN politicians and organizations, but if you have good intentions you can't be bad, now, can you? If you have blood on your hands and contribute to a 'good' cause, you can't be bad, now, can you? If you are cozy with organized crime and terrorists but have the right political flavor du jour, you can't be bad, now, can you?

When 3,000 innocents are killed in an act of war by a Private War organization, that requires a military response and GOT ONE. Those who made war now have it visited upon them. It was their choice to walk away from civilization, return to the Law of Nature of the Strong over the Weak and to be able to kill without compunction or reason. No one 'forced' them to do this. No one 'oppressed' them to do this. Many of the individuals involved with 9/11 were college educated, middle-class and able to speak sweetly and nicely. They had all the benefits of civilization and walked away from them with open eyes and closed minds. They don't value 'multiculturalism' and that is anathema to them. Trying to 'understand' them means understanding that they do not want your 'understanding' only your compliance with their will. And if you don't they will just as readily kill you as talk with you. That is what happens when you turn away from civilization: you turn away from civility.

You believe that power is an absolute right to rule others to fit your beliefs.

We now see that 9/11 is to be turned into a day of 'National Service and Remembrance'.

I can see Remembrance, there is no higher goal than to remember the sacrifice of the innocent dead.

National Service, however, is not part of that.

Giving back to your fellow man to build society is this thing we call 'Charity' and no government can take the place of individuals building society. When it tries to do so it robs society via oppressive taxation and believes that one can create 'good' by legislative fiat. When those in power try to 'Nationalize' Charity, it becomes enforced giving, enforced work and slavery to the State. To use the innocent dead to push this is ghoulish in the extreme, and is a direct feasting upon our memories of the dead and trying to turn it towards the State. That has not worked so well in any Nation that has tried it, this concept of 'National Service' being a good idea in its own right. Italy, Germany, Russia, China, North Korea, and many, many, many other Nations have tried this and found only Despotism and Tyranny as the end of this 'good' idea. Don't mind the millions dead due to death squads, gulags, concentration camps, re-education camps, gas chambers, firing squads and a World War that resulted when these 'good' ideas are tried out.

The dead are heaped at the feet of those who have tried this.

And now the ghouls appear to want more of this, and try ever so sweetly to ignore history and the final result of where these 'good' ideas lead. Since these claim to be 'intelligent' or even 'smart' individuals, I will then say that they must KNOW history and WANT this end for their fellow citizens. Tens, hundreds, thousands, even millions of 'smart' people have wanted this, only to find that what they create has no use for them and, even worse, sees them as a THREAT once it gets going and some of the first to find out how 'good' this is are those that backed it. Often at the point of a bayonet.

Conscription during wartime is a National Survival necessity: there will be no ability to have a Nation without it.

Although modern warfare is changing that, yet again.

During peacetime, for a republic of free people, it is enforced work upon the population, dictated by government. We removed that with Amendment XIII. That is not limited by race or color: it is true for all citizens of the Nation.

I heard the ghouls moan about the high cost of the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan and heard about it for years. How they would impoverish the Nation.

Then when one of their own is elected and spends more in 6 months than the entire cost of both conflicts COMBINED?

Our dead soldiers served their purpose for these partisans to 'win' at any cost, and try to say that those of us who spoke up about rampant spending during the previous Administration were actually supporters of it and shouldn't criticize when one of theirs is spending far more than the previous Administration did by multi-fold. I do not expect reason from those that feast upon the dead to push their talking points. They have demonstrated they have no ability TO reason, no moral compass and will utilize the dead to mere partisan ends and do not give a damn for the deep and hard sacrifices others make to let them keep their hides unscathed. They push 'health care' after bemoaning how bad the VA system is and refuse to actually FIX THAT FIRST TO HONOR OUR SOLDIERS.

Because they deserve it more than the worthless people who use their deaths to their partisan ends.

They seek to remove Charity from our society and call that 'good' as Charity just 'can't do what government can do'.

Like have enforced 'National Service'!

Or run concentration camps.

Or firing squads.

Or send out thugs to beat up the innocent who merely disagree with them.

Strange to say it, but Charity just can't do those things so it must be so very bad...that is where the partisan 'logic' and 'reason' ends up whenever it is deployed to put 'National Service' ahead of Charity.

Ask a ghoul to fix something and they will destroy it. They always want more flesh to consume so they can tell you how good it would be for you to be a corpse for them.

I am not the one who wants 'National Service' built upon the dead.

I am no ghoul, but wish to respect the dead as best I can without having someone tell me how to do it and that, really, I should think about 'National Service'.

I served in DoD on the civilian side for 14 years.

Feeling I was not doing enough for my Nation during wartime, I volunteered for an NIH study so as to help my fellow citizens and let medical science try out something that was relatively 'safe'.

The lead up to that, however, turned out to be not so safe, and I accept the price I paid as part of what goes with giving back to my Nation and my fellow citizens.

I have seen 'health care' up close and personal.

I have seen the very best in the business befuddled by my case.

I have seen and bear witness to a practicing physician who helped to finally start tracking the problem down.

And I continued on with the NIH trial to its conclusion, even when I had to be picked up and dropped off and could barely walk 50' on my own.

I have seen people even worse off than I am with conditions so rare they don't have names.

'Health care' is no magic bullet and is still more an art than a science.

No amount of money, no amount of insurance, indeed NOTHING can help you if you get one of those rare and nameless maladies. The ghouls have no sovereign cure, save to take your money, your liberty, your freedom, and then tell you exactly what you will get in life... until life does something to you they can't figure out. Then you are on your own, and it is best not to be on your own without liberty, freedom and the ability to get your own answers outside of a rigid system. Your life depends on it.

I have freely, willingly and with open eyes served my Nation.

Gladly did I volunteer for medical research as it is important for me to support my fellow man.

I would never, ever support any move to MAKE YOU DO GOOD.

There is no greater evil than that, taking away your liberty in that way, as it is enslavement.

Even such as Sen. Kennedy deserves his rest and our remembrance of him, good and ill, so we may take our measure of the man.

For those that have walked away from civilization, they have decided their fate and the only question is how much blood they can spill before their demise.

Those that feast upon their dead to enact their agendas?

They define themselves: Ghouls.

Fantasy Ideology and its fallout

2009-08-21T14:47:00.002-04:00

The following is from The Jacksonian Party.

The following is a white paper of The Jacksonian Party.

From Lee Harris, Al Qaeda's Fantasy Ideology:

Know your enemy” is a well-known maxim, but one that is difficult to observe in practice. Nor is the reason for this hard to fathom: If you are my enemy, it is unlikely that I will go very much out of my way to learn to see things from your point of view. And if this is true even in those cases where the conflict is between groups that share a common culture, how much more true will it be when there is a profound cultural and psychological chasm between the antagonists?
Yet, paradoxically, this failure to understand the enemy can arise not only from a lack of sympathy with his position, but also from a kind of misplaced sympathy: When confronted by a culturally exotic enemy, our first instinct is to understand such conduct in terms that are familiar to us — terms that make sense to us in light of our own fund of experience. We assume that if our enemy is doing x, it must be for reasons that are comprehensible in terms of our universe.

A Fantasy Ideology is one that can only determine the course of events and give policy within a limit set of mental boundaries that form up that ideology. Al Qaeda has a belief system that includes the concept that if one good and strong deed is done, then Allah will sweep his hand out to do the remaining deeds for you and lower your enemy. Lee Harris gives very good analysis of how that works and why, but the crux of the problem is that any fantasy ideology has within it fantastical concepts, magical concepts, that anyone without the ideology is put into a position of wondering why these people believe the world works that way when all experience demonstrates otherwise.

The premise presented by Mr. Harris is that when operating within a fantastical realm of thought that is supposed to determine how reality works, that those who get negative results do not take those results as an actual feedback to their actions, but as having missed some particular set of nuances inside the belief system that then need to be rectified. One particular point is brought up by Mr. Harris when he examines how this plays out in America, and it is an extended quote so as to get full context of his observation when having talked with a friend about an Anti-Vietnam war rally in Washington, he disagreed with a friend about the productiveness of a disruptive event that could turn very counter-productive, his friend disagreed and that even if it was counter-productive it was good for his soul:

What I saw as a political act was not, for my friend, any such thing. It was not aimed at altering the minds of other people or persuading them to act differently. Its whole point was what it did for him.
And what it did for him was to provide him with a fantasy — a fantasy, namely, of taking part in the revolutionary struggle of the oppressed against their oppressors. By participating in a violent anti-war demonstration, he was in no sense aiming at coercing conformity with his view — for that would still have been a political objective. Instead, he took his part in order to confirm his ideological fantasy of marching on the right side of history, of feeling himself among the elect few who stood with the angels of historical inevitability. Thus, when he lay down in front of hapless commuters on the bridges over the Potomac, he had no interest in changing the minds of these commuters, no concern over whether they became angry at the protesters or not. They were there merely as props, as so many supernumeraries in his private psychodrama. The protest for him was not politics, but theater; and the significance of his role lay not in the political ends his actions might achieve, but rather in their symbolic value as ritual. In short, he was acting out a fantasy.
It was not your garden-variety fantasy of life as a sexual athlete or a racecar driver, but in it, he nonetheless made himself out as a hero — a hero of the revolutionary struggle. The components of his fantasy — and that of many young intellectuals at that time — were compounded purely of ideological ingredients, smatterings of Marx and Mao, a little Fanon and perhaps a dash of Herbert Marcuse.
For want of a better term, call the phenomenon in question a fantasy ideology — by which I mean, political and ideological symbols and tropes used not for political purposes, but entirely for the benefit of furthering a specific personal or collective fantasy. It is, to be frank, something like “Dungeons and Dragons” carried out not with the trappings of medieval romances — old castles and maidens in distress — but entirely in terms of ideological symbols and emblems. The difference between them is that one is an innocent pastime while the other has proven to be one of the most terrible scourges to afflict the human race.

This concept is not unknown and was seen decades prior to the Vietnam war by another man who was examining the decline of Western Culture. From Oswald Spengler, The Oswald Spengler Collection: Biographical Essay; Extracts From The Decline Of The West: The Hour of Decision:

We live in momentous times. The stupendous dynamism of the historical epoch that has now dawned makes it the grandest, not only in the Faustian civilization of Western Europe, but - for that very reason - in all world-history, greater and by far more terrible than the ages of Caesar and Napoleon. Yet how blind are the human beings over whom this mighty destiny is surging, whirling them in confusion, exalting them, destroying them! Who among them sees and comprehends what is being done to them and around them? Some wise old Chinaman or Indian, perhaps, who gazes around him in silence with the stored-up thought of a thousand years in his soul. But how superficial, how narrow, how small-minded are the judgments and measures of Western Europe and America! What do the inhabitants of the Middle West of the United States know of what goes on beyond New York and San Francisco? What conception has a middle-class Englishman, not to speak of a French provincial, of the trend of affairs on the Continent? What, indeed, does any one of them know of the direction in which his very own destiny is facing? All we have is a number of absurd catchwords such as "overcoming the economic crisis," "understanding of peoples," "national security and self-sufficingness," with which to "overcome" catastrophes within the space of a generation or two by means of "prosperity" and disarmament.

Spengler was coming to grips with a movement of Western Civilization that had started before his time and was gaining steam in his life. He saw the results of the inward-looking trends of Western Civilization and in identifying those trends he sought to understand them as they play out in society. He would examine this playing out in Germany, but the general thesis is plain across Western Culture that the insularity was leading to a belief that by giving popular catchwords or phrases that a problem could be defined, refined and then addressed all in good order. Yet there is only the order we create in the world and it is not one that broad generalizations or categories can properly address. The idea of a citizen being self-responsible and knowing enough of the world to make good decisions was being supplanted by one of moving decisions from the citizenry and upwards to governments. By giving pleasing words to represent what were thought to be the problems, the citizenry was given that their politicians actually knew what they were doing. That, however, led to World Wars and global ideological conflicts as those not joining in this Western inward conception of the world continued to act outside the constraints of political definition.

That latter effect he would go into, and it was one that politicians would utilize to further isolate the common man from world affairs and even the affairs of government:

Added to all this is the universal dread of reality. We "pale-faces" have it, all of us, although we are seldom, and most of us never, conscious of it. It is the spiritual weakness of the "Late" man of the higher civilizations, who lives in his cities cut off from the peasant and the soil and thereby from the natural experiencing of destiny, time, and death. He has become too wide awake, too accustomed to ponder perpetually over yesterday and tomorrow, and cannot bear that which he sees and is forced to see: the relentless course of things, senseless chance, and real history striding pitilessly through the centuries into which the individual with his tiny scrap of private life is irrevocably born at the appointed place. That is what he longs to forget, refute, or contest. He takes flight from history into solitude, into imaginary far-away systems, into some faith or another, or into suicide. Like a grotesque ostrich he buries his head in hopes, ideals, and cowardly optimism: it is so, but it ought not to be, therefore it is otherwise. We sing in the woods at night because we are afraid. Similarly, the cowardice of cities shouts its apparent optimism to the world for very fear. Reality is no longer to be borne. The wish-picture of the future is set in place of facts - although fate has never taken any notice of human fancies - from the children's Land of Do-Nothing to the World Peace and Workers' Paradise of the grown-ups.
Little as one knows of events in the future - for all that can be got from a comparison of other civilizations is the general form of future facts and their march through the ages - so much is certain: the forces which will sway the future are no other than those of the past. These forces are: the will of the Strong, healthy instincts, race, the will to possession and power; while justice, happiness, and peace - those dreams which will always remain dreams - hover ineffectively over them.

At this point we now merge Spengler and Harris, to see the passage of Western Civilization going into a mode of thought that is fantastical not only in its beginnings but in its outcomes. The actual 'do this activity because it is a good activity' that was present before the ongoing urbanization of the West was being replaced by a fantastical conception of what man had to actually do to get good results: you just had to have good intentions and talk a good game, and let others do the hard work for you. That is not living with reality, but a fantasy in which what is said gets magically enacted in the real world and made perfect because it had such a good start as an idea. Narrative for your own life that you write now replaces actually living a life that is worth being narrated by others. Instead of being ground up in the urban environment where you are just one individual isolated from others within a large city by yourself and unwilling to do the hard work of actually getting to know others around you, as was done in small towns heretofore, you need only join isolated social groups that have such similar beliefs that you think by acting across a wide-ranging physical landscape that you are also doing that for the mental landscape and that all other areas believe just as you do. Never mind that is one, single, individual from a farther area that believes as you do, that individual must represent 'the masses' around him. That is how personal heroic narratives go, and so you make your struggle that 'of the people' while not actually reaching out of your limited mental confines to experience a variety of the people who just might disagree with you.

Western Civilization, Spengler's 'white culture', is part of the ongoing evaluation of how man examines himself, places himself amongst his fellow man and then uses the observed differences to inform him so as to make decisions. What this boils down to, although Spengler could not know it, is a more generalized condition of man via his own works, that would separate man from the inherent wisdom of working with nature and understanding it. If all of our great works are so wonderful, and they are, then why are we to die so as not to appreciate them forevermore? By creating the works, themselves, man does that self-isolation, and to live in cities is to live in a created realm that has little attachment to nature and yet nature comes to pull man out of it as nature can only be built upon, not replaced. This new form of man has a name to him: Homo Urbanus.

What happens when man moves from nature to urban environments? This is what Spengler addresses and the disconcerting problem is that as urban areas are created, they have a seeming facade of control to them via that creation. Yet this urban creation does not cater to the needs of those who are there: the poor remain poor, the sick remain sick, and the needs to get basic 'services' to such people then taxes our creation that is not meant for so many to be crowded into urban environments. The cries we hear, today, of the 'global problems' are not a reality but a reaction to our urban world being unable to cope with the needs of our own people and, thus, we recoil from it and cast about for something, anything, that we might be able to do something about so as to ignore the things we can do nothing about. Our great works fail in many areas and our own mortality is reflected in that failure.

Those that follow politics see this play out on the Left that asserts certain future 'facts': that everyone will have affordable health care, that everyone will live in peace with each other, that our world is being destroyed by us, that we must change NOW in order to get to a perfect world. That imperative is repeated for everything from Dreadnoughts to nuclear arms to 'population bombs' to a coming global ice age to being irradiated by nuclear reactors to the dangers of cars to the dangers of not eating right to global warming to health care: there is nothing that cannot be put off as a future 'fact' that can not be addressed NOW if you would just give up some of your liberty to those that run urban societies. Do not bother these adherents of urban fantasy with such things as economics, human culture, manufacturing needs, limits on what can be done with medicine or the very fact that man being a creature of nature will never be perfect or perfectable, just able to be more perfect than he was. By putting that into play and to show our advances, those who want a perfect world will then castigate you for how far we have yet to go... yet we can get there instantly if we give up our liberty, our self-identity and our worth to government.

To them.

Those that use the past to guide their decisions, who examine civilizations of all cultures, see this siren song again and again: serve Pharaoh and all will be well, be forced to unity under a warlord and all will be well, give Caesar the power to rule and all will be well, let the smart decide for you or the powerful or the politically well connected and all will be well. Be it Agamemnon, Ramses, Alexander, Caesar, Genghis Khan, Lenin, Stalin, Mussolini, Hitler, Pol Pot, Mao, Castro... the idea that an entire people can be embodied in a single representative who rules arises so often in mankind's past that it is to be seen as the norm of how man works. Yet the Enlightenment was to move us down a path away from hero worship and from belief in a perfect State and to one of imperfectable man creating imperfect works and dealing with problems as they arose. With increasing urbanization comes the belief that we CAN control what we build, that nature CAN be made to do our bidding, we forget the actual nature of the world and ourselves. The grotesque fantasies of childhood are not dispelled so long as there is a belief that by dealing with WORDS you can deal with THINGS and EVENTS. We have clear evidence over the history of mankind that trying to make future 'facts' come true, requires the most horrific of events to happen so as to make those 'facts' arrive.

We CAN make sure that the elderly are always cared for by government. And create a system headed to insolvency that will bankrupt the Nation.

We CAN wage a 'war' on poverty. And yet the poor are ever with us no matter how much we spend.

We CAN wage a 'war' on cancer. And find that it is not one thing but many, many things that each need different approaches so that there is no 'silver bullet'.

We CAN have a post office for first class mail. That now runs a deficit each quarter and needs massive subsidies to run in an inefficient manner.

We CAN give government the ability to 'regulate' our banking and currency. Yet that has made one recession into a Great Depression and spurred on another recession to something deeper.

We CAN give government the ability to regulate corporations. And find it was unable to do so and helped cause at least one recession if not more of them.

We CAN help people 'live the American Dream' to buy a home. And build a corpulent bureaucracy full of political cronies who then strong-arm banks to give loans to people who don't have good credit or ANY credit at all nor the means to pay off such loans.

We CAN make drugs illegal. And then spend billions upon billions chasing the now illegal drugs, putting small time users in jail by the truck load and giving a massive stimulus to global organized crime and terrorism.

We CAN give government the ability to tax disproportionately because it will NEVER tax the working class. Which died as an ideal within years of the passage of that.

We CAN give government tremendous 'oversight' to the banking industry. And find that it misses huge fraud systems by organized crime that even a decade on can not be unraveled.

We CAN give government more to do to make us better off. And find our liberty, our lives, and our freedom threatened by so many regulations that even the regulators can not keep up with them all and YOU are at risk for breaking many, many federal regulations each and every second of every day and should probably be put in jail for your own good when you are born so you can have your life dictated to you without the niceties of faking civil society.

It is that worrying last part that makes the cycle difficult to understand, in that thinking that the words we put into regulations under law will, actually, change society and change mankind. Instead we find ourselves coming to be not only ignorant of the proliferating regulations but coming to understand that such regulations, no matter how 'good' their ends, are not worth the means of their creation. From that we come to accept that we, as individuals, will practice common sense when leading our lives with the understanding that all the good worded regulations are not worth learning. From that we become criminal not from conscious intent but from not caring about the regulations and their goals. Mankind under Homo Urbanus then moves towards Homo Criminalis: Criminal Man.

From Wim Bernasco, Foraging Strategies of Homo Criminalis: Lessons From Behavioral Ecology, Crime Patterns and Analysis, ECCA Journal, Vol. 2, No. 1, 2009:

Environmental questions on how crime is enacted are perhaps regularly asked in criminology, but elaborated theories that explain behavioral variations are rare. Sometimes, routine activities theory (Cohen and Felson 1979) is used to answer such questions. According to this theory, crime arises from patterns of ordinary legal activities. When these patterns lead to motivated perpetrators and unprotected targets being present in the same place at the same time, the necessary and sufficient conditions for criminality are fulfilled, and crimes will occur. By this theory, crime is thus a question of “systematic coincidence.” An objection to this approach is that it does not take the goal-oriented behavior of many perpetrators sufficiently into account. For many of them, committing crimes is an everyday routine. Moreover, many criminals do not merely encounter unprotected targets by accident but consciously go in search of them, as is shown by the findings of many ethnographic studies (e.g., Wright and Decker 1997, 1994). Rational choice theory (Cornish and Clarke 1986) is also frequently used to answer environmental questions on crime. This theory is not concerned with criminal motivation either, but in this case because it assumes that every person is in principle prepared to commit crime. Rational choice theory regards every form of behavior as a goal-oriented choice directed toward accomplishing objectives. The point of departure is that, after weighing the advantages and disadvantages of various alternatives, a choice is made which is optimal given the aim (benefit maximization). Rational choice theory itself is abstract and requires supplementary empirical content through specification of the relevant aims and choice situations. To be able to apply rational choice theory to questions of how crime is enacted, a supplemental theory is therefore often necessary with respect to the choice situations with which individuals are confronted as they make decisions about when, where, how and against what target an offense will be committed.

An over-regulated world creates a rational choice space within it, that requires that each individual makes the best choice for themselves that is goal-oriented towards what they are doing. As that often requires, or even demands, that regulations be broken to accomplish these activities, individuals do so: to perform legal activities in an efficient manner so as to yield best price vs cost results, the breaking of a regulation is more than just a savings point in monetary terms, but a negation of cost to the activity involved so as to yield greater gains and timeliness to the activity and transaction. When government so believes it can control all behavior, all transactions, everything about commerce, we find that the overwhelming burden of it upon ourselves and our businesses not only does not increase accountability, but diminishes it.

From the WSJ 28 APR 2009:

Mr. Lewis has told investigators for New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo that in December Mr. Paulson threatened him not to cancel a deal to buy Merrill Lynch. BofA had discovered billions of dollars in undisclosed Merrill losses, and Mr. Lewis was considering invoking his rights under a material adverse condition clause to kill the merger. But Washington decided that America's financial system couldn't withstand a Merrill failure, and that BofA had to risk its own solvency to save it. So then-Treasury Secretary Paulson, who says he was acting at the direction of Federal Reserve Chairman Bernanke, told Mr. Lewis that the feds would fire him and his board if they didn't complete the deal.
Mr. Paulson told Mr. Lewis that the government would provide cash from the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) to help BofA swallow Merrill. But since the government didn't want to reveal this new federal investment until after the merger closed, Messrs. Paulson and Bernanke rejected Mr. Lewis's request to get their commitment in writing.
"We do not want a disclosable event," Mr. Lewis says Mr. Paulson told him. "We do not want a public disclosure." Imagine what would happen to a CEO who said that.
After getting the approval of his board, Mr. Lewis executed the Paulson-Bernanke order without informing his shareholders of the material events taking place at Merrill. The merger closed on January 1. But investors and taxpayers had to wait weeks to learn that the government had invested another $20 billion plus loan portfolio insurance in BofA, and that Merrill had lost a staggering $15 billion in the last three months of 2008.
This was the second time in three months that Washington had forced Bank of America to take federal money. In his testimony to the New York AG's office, Mr. Lewis noted that an earlier TARP investment in his bank had a "dilutive effect" on existing shareholders and was not requested by BofA. "We had not sought any funds. We were taking 15 [billion dollars] at the request of Hank [Paulson] and others," Mr. Lewis testified.

The government as 'regulator' turns into the government as 'strongman'. We go from it being for the common good for all transactions in banking institutional investment to be held openly between institutions for mergers and consolidations, to having them put into secret by government fiat so as to commit the very abuses the regulatory structure was meant to eliminate. The ease of the criminal behavior on the part of those that are supposed to ENFORCE the regulations points to that change over to Homo Criminalis: the shift from breaking minor regulations for commercial expediency to undercutting the structure of transparent transactions for government expediency. Homo Criminalis is Homo Urbanus who is willing to undercut the very structure of regulations that allows the urban environment to prosper because it is a 'good thing to do'. This was what Spengler was talking about when those in government who are unconnected with reality try to force 'facts' to happen.

The dread of reality is not that it can be summed up in nice, neat catch phrases but that it can't. When the expediency of 'we are doing this for your own good' replaces the actual and fair system of due process, you no longer have due process of law, but process to pre-defined outcomes. And when reality does not conform to those outcomes, when bolstering the banking structure leads to unaccountable transactions and money that cannot even be FOUND that have come from the public coffers, you find that the COST of such 'facts' far outweigh any 'solution' that was meant to get to them. That is not only in purely economic terms, although that is horrific on its own, but in social and cultural terms as this is an abrogation of trust at the highest levels of government. As both Parties and both Presidents wanted this to happen, BOTH have demonstrated that they are untrustworthy. If one President leaves with little trust, the next comes in picking up the exact, same methods and procedures and finds his trust eroded no end.

What is even deeper than the corruption of public institutions by such activities is that those pushing for the 'good ideas' that will assuredly lead to good ends, no matter what the process, have forgotten that it is the process that is to make good ends and to be satisfied with that process and its ends as they are a benefit to all of society. This conception of wanting the good end and enacting laws to 'make it so', and becoming a personal hero because you took part in the pushing of the idea, is in harsh contrast with the previous version of heroic acts. Laying down in front of a car to protest a war is not a heroic act to all of society, but to yourself, only: it is a narcissistic conception of hero that sees the only benefit of your actions coming to yourself, with hopes of praise from others that it was, indeed, heroic. Unfortunately much of that praise comes from other self-oriented 'heros' who have a vested interest in giving praise so as to get praise.

Heroic deeds are done in service to an end, of course, no one would deny that. A hero, however, does the deeds as they are related to the end, and does not allow them to become an end in, and of, themselves. Some heroes set out on heroic journeys but find that there is a deep and grave cost to them in lost comrades, lost paths and even lost hope. Odysseus was one such who was already a Hero of the Trojan War, a 'sacker of cities' in the grand set of conflicts that would see Troy stripped of her affiliated trade partners. Returning a Hero from war, however, and helping to bring the Trojan War to an end, was not the end of the Heroes journey and Odysseus would find himself and his men hard put to survive the tempest ride home. Indeed the older and wiser Odysseus would be the sole survivor of that journey: returning alone with the rest of his comrades in arms lost to destiny. Hercules would find Goddess given madness given to him just long enough to have him kill his beloved wife and family. Even knowing that this was not his own rage he saw that this is the rage that flesh is heir to and needed to atone for his being part man and part God. His journey to atonement would require him to tame himself as seen in the Hydra where the passion of battle rage would defeat any who only saw red until they were exhausted and eaten by the multiplicity of heads their combat had created. Jesus Christ would have his fate tested high and low, the problems of being a man exposed and fight through those only to have his final faith tested on the Cross: he was heroic for keeping his faith, not just in any single deed and would point out that we ALL have these problems within us.

The reasons that Heroes are universal is that they speak to the human condition writ large: they face dangers and problems so extreme that ours pale in comparison. And yet the story of them is that they win through or die trying and that, often, achievement of the goal is not the end and it may not even be a good end. Hercules can only find redemption in a living warrior's funeral pyre, Jesus would die on the Cross to have his eternal self revealed and Odin would be pinned to Yggdrasil and lose one eye to the crows only to be bestowed the gift seeing into the future from that empty socket even though he knew what the final destiny of the Gods was, already. Odysseus would return to find suitors clustered at his old home, trying to get the hand of his wife in marriage after he had been presumed dead and gone. She would be rewarded by her faith in him and his return would see the suitors put to a bloody end: there would be no other in the home of Odysseus worthy of his bow. Each of these Gods and Men would seek out those necessary things to them and find a high, high price to pay for their fame, and we would tell stories of their works as ours are so small how can we not find some part of us that can get through our much smaller pains and problems?

To continue on with Spengler we get the following:

But Romanticism too, with its lack of a sense for reality, is just as much an expression of rationalist arrogance as are Idealism and Materialism. They are all in fact closely related, and it would be difficult to discover the boundary between these two trends of thought in any political or social Romantic. In every outstanding Materialist a Romantic lies hidden. [3] Though he may scorn the cold, shallow, methodical mind of others, he has himself enough of that sort of mind to do so in the same way and with the same arrogance. Romanticism is no sign of powerful instincts, but, on the contrary, of a weak, self-detesting intellect. They are all infantile, these Romantics; men who remain children too long (or for ever), without the strength to criticize themselves, but with perpetual inhibitions arising from the obscure awareness of their own personal weakness; who are impelled by the morbid idea of reforming society, which is to them too masculine, too healthy, too sober. And to reform it, not with knives and revolvers in the Russian fashion - heaven forbid! - but by noble talk and poetic theories. Hapless indeed they are if, lacking creative power, they lack also the artistic talent to persuade at least themselves that they possess it. Yet even in their art they are feminine and weak, incapable of setting a great novel or a great tragedy on its legs, still less a pure philosophy of any force. All that appears is spineless lyric, bloodless scenarios, and fragmentary ideas, all of them displaying an innocence of and antagonism to the world which amounts to absurdity. But it was the same with the unfading "Youths" (Jünglinge), with their "old German" coats and pipes - Jahn and Arndt, even, included. Stein himself was unable to control his romantic taste for ancient constitutions sufficiently to allow him to turn his extensive practical experience to successful account in diplomacy. Oh, they were heroes, and noble, and ready to be martyrs at any moment; but they talked too much about German nature and too little about railways and customs unions, and thus became only an obstacle in the way of Germany's real future. Did they ever so much as hear the name of the great Friedrich List, who committed suicide in 1846 because no one understood and supported his far-sighted and modern political aim, the building of an economic Germany? But they all knew the names of Arminius and Thusnelda.

Those saying they are in 'real world' views and then holding fantastical outlooks are substituting their fantasy of the way they wish the world should work for the way it does work. They will tell you of all the things they support, all the changes they want, and how, really, everyone is striving towards that same end. Without exception! Save those nasty people who disagree with them... what is strange is that those living in this 'real world' conception are unable to put forth their own courage save in the 'I protested, I'm a hero!' way, that is neither heroic nor actually a deeply held theological nor ideological conception of how the world works. Those who have protested war in Iraq, say, have grown quiet even though the conflict continues and grows bloody as we seek to pull out from it: they will take NO responsibility for the blood on their hands for their grand ideals and don't care if others die for their ideals because they are 'right'. To be 'right' however, requires adult ownership and responsibility to one's beliefs and obligation to recognize that ideology has real world consequences. Saying that Jason and the Argonauts getting the Golden Fleece is a great idea and then claiming part of their heroism for yourself is not being heroic: you have not done the hard work, suffered with the grieving, made amends for the dead, but just claim part of someone else's actions for yourself. Leaving a war requires as much, if not more time, care and oversight so as to end it in an equitable fashion than getting INTO it. The United States spend the end of 1941 to mid-1945 at war, and then would require more years to help rebuild Germany, Italy, France... and over a decade in Japan to ensure that a constitutional republic had really been established there. And our forces are STILL not fully out of these problems and on station to continue our help DECADES later.

Thus the political Left in America is not only following a fantasy ideology but, like the Romantics in Germany, unwilling to actually toil at what they talk about. Instead it is 'protest this' or 'march that' and 'chant the other' all the while the things that they seek to ease, poverty, sickness, corruption in politics, a better understanding between Nations, all of that can be DONE by individuals who are willing to put themselves into the fray to actually DO THE WORK. The modern Left in America is not only unwilling to enter the fray, they criticize any who DO that and wish to put those works at an end because people actually dare, DARE to follow through on their beliefs with direct work for them. They are all ready to 'man the barricades' and 'change society', but please don't ask them to move from their computers, coffee houses, or elite social groups to actually get their hands dirty doing any of that. Homo Urbanus knows better because they 'know' what everyone wants. Just don't bother them to talk with everyday people who may not agree with them to find out, as that would take actually going out into the world from their Urban environs which are self-imposed no matter if it is a teenager in an apartment in the heart of any major city or Theodore John Kaczynski who would write diatribes against modern society, spend long hours crafting bombs and then send those out to kill and maim innocents to prove just how deranged society was as he had spent so many hours describing. Really, it had to be true if it would drive a nice man like him to do these things, doesn't it?

With that the Unabomber completed his cycle to Homo Criminalis deciding to impose his tracts on society via brute force of criminal activity. What he did, instead, is show the derangement that comes with believing that mere words and great wishes describe society entire: they cannot. To be flexible in outlook towards cultures means mutual respect of cultures, understanding the good and ills of each culture and working to improve your own while not endangering that of others. The modern Left has no wish of that, and prefers a bland 'multi-cultural' blanket of easy to identify racial and sexual characteristics to the actual work of taking time to understand other people's, their cultures, their mores, their ethics and their moralities. Self-sequestered into pointless 'me too' heroics, and group thinking, the Left demonstrates a form of decadence about their own cultural interests: they don't have any to judge anyone by save within their groups and identity political realms.

It is telling that 'identity politics' so suffuses the Left that anyone who doesn't act according to the precepts of it are then only seen in the prism of 'identity politics'. If you disagree with a black or hispanic candidate you are dubbed: racist. That misses the point of those who can only judge by 'race' and who call 'racism' at every turn are, in themselves, practicing racism. The idea that anyone else just might have a different way to view the world and politics, and accept that policy is a good way to judge character is not acceptable as it requires the actual examination of policy and then trying to see if that is acceptable to an entire Nation. Anyone who criticizes the modern Left on a policy basis is only judged by the Left's own inward looking prism of 'identity politics' based on race, gender, ethnicity, religion and social class. The concept of good policy that must work across all classes, races, genders and not infringe on the rights or liberty of anyone is now apostasy to the Left: to speak of it makes you a RADICAL in their eyes, who is racist, classist and so on.

It would be funny if it weren't so lethal.

This is the politics of 'the ends justifies the means' so that any, and I do mean ANY, excuse as a good end then justifies the expansion of government, erosion of liberty, removal of freedom and vesting more and more power in National government that then can make laws and rules to cover any aspect of life from the moment you are born to the moment you die: the State will decide if you are to be born, how you are to live, and when you die. By forcing society to 'do good' via government, the powers of government being those that we vest in it for our own security, are then turned against the people of a Nation. There is no 'good' in that even if the ends are reached as expected, but those ends are never reached because they are unreachable objects in and of themselves. To remove poverty we must have none that are rich and, thusly, impoverish everyone to a life of servitude in which their liberty gains them NOTHING. Indeed, being able to prosper by one's own works is seen as an absolute threat to the modern Left that prefers to imbue government with being able to do everything good and that people just have to be restrained so that they can do good.

In putting forward so much for the State and so little for individuals, what is sought is the life of servitude, no matter how 'nice' or 'good' for all citizens. The 'elite' will 'toil' with grand ideas that they will then force everyone ELSE to work at. Yet it is that very elite structure now in the highest reaches of government, and it has been there for decades, that have increased the amount of regulations on us to the point where over 2/3, if not 3/4 by now, of all regulations have been enacted since 1972. And yet we have seen no end of poverty. Sickness is still with us. Our infrastructure decays rapidly. Businesses find it hard to expand and grow due to regulations that put high burdens on growing so as to protect Big Business elites. It is laughable that 'regulations' actually threaten large businesses when they are the ones able to get seats at the table to WRITE THEM no matter which party is in power.

Thus the modern RIGHT now has the problems of the modern LEFT in believing that more regulations, more laws, and more interference in the lives of individuals is a GOOD THING. If that is merely lethal when done by one-half of the political 'spectrum' then it is FATAL to liberty and freedom when done by ALL of it. Yet this last election demonstrates that little more than 50% of the public eligible to vote actually voted. That 49% that didn't vote are not absent by mandate, but by choice: they purposefully stay away from the polls as they find nothing, no one, worth voting FOR. They are not 'leaving it to the knowledgeable', but telling the 'knowledgeable' that they have NOTHING to offer these that do not vote. Any organization that could offer even a fraction of the non-voting public a reason TO vote would swing politics in this Nation completely in ways that neither the Left nor Right can fathom. To do that, however, takes hard work, meeting your fellow man, understanding him, and working out the basis of agreement so as to fashion a new political view that starts to bring down the edifice created by these 'modern' parties and yet stay fully in the modern world.

As neither Party seems able to do that, these days, we now must look to the people who don't show up at elections, those who are so fed up with the system that they have withdrawn their support for it. Perhaps they have some folks willing to do things with each other so as to create a better Nation and remove the laws and regulations that have turned us into Homo Criminalis. Because neither Party will support liberty and freedom for the common man as they both believe that by mandating the good they are actually creating it. Instead they practice a far worse evil than mere criminality: they seek to remove the actual good behind doing good of your own free will.

There is no worse evil than that as it becomes the source of all tyranny.

Political violence is in what part of the spectrum?

2009-08-19T12:18:00.001-04:00

Spurred on by those who put forward that it is the 'Right' or 'conservatives' that engender violence in US culture, I decided to take a look at those high level affairs that were either important in their time or in the realm of politics for the US. This is by no means an all inclusive listing, but one that looks at the realm of high-level assassinations. I am NOT looking at foreign assassinations nor their political motivations. And if I cannot quickly discern a political affiliation that is strong for an assassin(s) then I say so. I am more than ready to put in the actual affiliations, but motivation is far more important than anything else as that is what is implied as being on the 'Right' or with 'conservatives.

So here is the deeply unhappy list I put together.

It is not a list of large scale terrorist events, thus you will not find McVeigh on it as he and other terrorists are generally doing something called 'Private War' against the Nation. That list is highly diverse, however, and the decades of terror acts aimed at the US has a huge list of events, actors, and motivations behind them. Terrorists can commit assassinations, but large scale acts aimed at the Nation are Acts of War not assassinations.

If you want a better list of high level assassinations, do it yourself... and read of the unhappiness that can find room in the heart of your fellow man.

=====

2000

Attempted assassination of President Clinton by FARC - Motivation: Terrorism. In general the Colombian police found a bomb planted in a room that President Clinton was to give a speech in within a few hours and the device was traced to FARC. Political party - Unknown/FARC.

1998

Assassination of Tommy Burks by Byron (Low Tax) Looper - Motivation: Political opportunism to murder an opponent to get his name removed from the ballot. Looper had changed his middle name to signify his political beliefs, had previously switched parties, and ran numerous false news accounts of his political achievements. Also an ex-girlfriend sued for child support and fraud and charged Looper of using his political office to harass her. Republicans helped the wife of the murdered Tommy Burks run a write-in campaign to win the election. Political party - Republican.

1994

Attempted assassination of President Bill Clinton by Francisco Martin Duran - Motivation: Possibly infamy. Plead guilty, attempted insanity defense that involved a celestial alien umbilical cord and incitement by a conservative talk radio host, and was convicted for his crimes. He had an aggravated assault conviction prior to this while in the Army. Political party - Unknown.

Assassination of Meir Kahane bye El Sayyid Nosair - Motivation: Terrorism and member of al Qaeda. Political party - Unknown.

1981

Attempted assassination of President Reagan by John Hinckley, Jr. - Motivation: Insanity caused by obsession. Political party - Unknown.

1980

John Lennon killed by Mark David Chapman - Motivation: Seeking infamy. Sought to be found insane at first, but recanted and was found competent to plead guilty, but was deemed in need of mental treatment at sentencing. Political party - Unknown.

1979

Assassination of District Judge John H. Wood, Jr. by Charles Voyde Harrelson - Motivation: Hitman hired by drug dealer Jamiel Chagra. Previously tried for the murder of Sam Degelia. Political party - Unknown.

1978

San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk assassinated by Daniel James White - Motivation: City politics/depression. In general the infamous 'twinkie defense' is best known as Dan White's legacy, and he would later commit suicide while out on parole. Political party - Democratic.

1975

Attempted assassination of President Ford by Lynette Alice "Squeaky" Fromme - Motivation: Unknown, previously a member of the Manson Family. Political party - Unknown.

Attempted assassination of President Ford by Sara Jane Moore - Motivation: Uknown, possibly mental instability, later in life stated it was due to her "radical views". Political party - Unknown.

1974

Attempted assassination of Richard Nixon by Samuel Byck - Motivation: Derangement/personal, depression, attempt to start "Operation Pandora's Box" given in tapes to columnist Jack Anderson, belief that government was trying to suppress the poor. Had sent other tapes to Jonas Salk, Abraham Ribicoff, Leonard Bernstein and attempted to join the Black Panther Party, as well as held protests in front of the White House without gaining permits to do so. Political party - Unknown.

1972

Attempted assassination of George Wallace by Arthur Bremer - Motivation: Personal statement about his manhood, wrote that he would kill either Richard Nixon or George Wallace to demonstrate it and become infamous. Plan to assassinate President Nixon was thwarted due to high security, stopped on initial attempt against Wallace due to teenagers being near glass behind Wallace who might have been blinded. In general obsession with assassinations, personal derangement. Political party - Unknown.

1968

Martin Luther King, Jr. assassinated by James Earl Ray - Motivation: Racial/Habitual criminal. In general Ray had been convicted of burglary, armed robbery twice, and mail fraud, thus being a habitual criminal. He had left the scene of the crime and after conviction attempted to escape from prison. Political party - Unknown.

Attempted assassination of Andy Warhol by Valerie Solanas - Motivation: Paranoid-Schizophrenia/mentally unstable, possible infamy to get her play produced. Political party - Unknown.

John F. Kennedy assassinated by Sirhan Sirhan - Motivation: Political, anti-Zionist/mentally unstable. In general he was a Palestinian-American who did not want a positive foreign policy towards Israel, and was obsessive that RFK would do that. Political party - Unknown.

1965

Malcolm X assassinated by Talmadge Hayer, Norman 3X Butler and Thomas 15X Johnson. Motivation: Killed by members of the Nation of Islam after leaving it and shifting his agenda from equal rights to human rights and changed his views after the Hajj that racism by any color is destructive. Jury convictions covers all three men, Butler claims the others were not involved. Political affiliation of the assassins - Nation of Islam, Political party - Unknown.

1963

Medgar Evers assassinated by Byron De La Beckwith - Motivation: Racial - KKK member, Phineas Preisthood member, anti-semite, anti-multiculturalism, anti-taxation. In general hatred of Blacks, Jews, Catholics and the US Government. Also planned to murder the head of the B'nai Brith in 1973. Political party - Democratic.

President Kennedy assassinated by Lee Harvey Oswald - Motivation: Political, seeking infamy. Prior attempted assassination of General Walker who was an anti-communist, segregationist and member of the John Birch Society. Political party - Communist sympathizer.

Lee Harvey Oswald assassinated by Jack Ruby - Motivation: Mental instability, depth of feeling for Kennedy family. In general Jack Ruby was a small time hustler who came from Chicago and was described as 'meshuga' or 'not having a full deck' and known to be unstable in both criminal and social environs. Political party - Unknown.

1960

Attempted assassination of President Kennedy by Richard Paul Pavlick - Motivation: Mentally unstable/insane. In general believed that the 1960 election was stolen, criticized the government and was anti-Catholic. Political party - Republican sympathizer.

1958

Attempted assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. by a black woman, Izola Curry - Motivation: Derangement/Insanity determined incompetent to stand trial and committed to a mental hospital. Political party - Unknown.

1935

Huey Long believed to be assassinated by Carl Weiss, but that is since been put into question - Motivation: Dave Haas led an anti-Long group called "Minute Men" and claims that Weiss drew the straw to kill Long during an ambush. Dave Haas' statements have been shown to be less than truthful, but it can be said that Long died in a shoot-out with anti-Long individuals. Political party - Unknown/anti-Long.

1933

Attempted assassination of President-elect Franklin Delano Roosevelt by Giuseppe Zangara - Motivation: Zangara was a small time pawn shop owner living off of his savings and hated the capitalist system which he saw the President-elect as one of the people involved in capitalism undermining workers. In general he was convicted of one of the others that he shot at wildly as the chair he was standing on collapsed under him. Political party - Unknown.

1912

Attempted assassination of President Theodore Roosevelt by John Flammang Schrank - Motivation: Mentally unstable/insane/political and declared to be insane. Schrank did not believe any President should seek a third term and also had visions from the previously assassinated McKinley, plus other mental problems. Roosevelt continued on to give a 90 minute speech with a bullet lodged in his chest, and then was hospitalized after that. Political party - Unknown.

1909

Jim Miller lynched for killing the local Sheriff - Motivation: Outlaw, gun for hire and assassin. Political party - Unknown.

1901

President William McKinley assassinated by Leon Czolgosz - Motivation: Disaffected Anarchist using the template of another Anarchist assassination as inspiration. In general expressed support for anarchism and the working man. Political party - Unknown/Anarchist.

1893

Chicago Mayor Carter Harrison, Sr. was assassinated by Patrick Eugene Prendergast - Motivation: Seeking political appointment after supporting Harrison's run for election/mentally unstable declared insane. Harrison did not know who Prendergast was. Political party - Democratic.

1882

Jesse James assassinated by Robert Ford - Motivation: Betrayal/reward for killing an outlaw and getting a pardon for his crimes, infamy. Political party - Unknown/City Councilman of Las Vegas.

1881

Assassination of President Garfield by Charles Julius Guiteau - Motivation: Mental instability/derangement. Failed lawyer and theologian who felt he deserved a job in the Garfield Administration for his support of it. Political party - Republican.

1876

Assassination of "Wild Bill" Hickock by Jack McCall - Motivation: Revenge for Hickock having killed his brother years previoiusly/act of generosity by Hickock offering to buy McCall breakfast after a bad night of poker for McCall. Tried for murder on US territory, convicted and hanged. Political party - Unknown.

1865

President Abraham Lincoln assassinated by John Wilkes Booth, with help from Lewis Powell and David Herold who was supposed to assassinate Secretary of State William Seward, along with George Atzerodt who was to kill VP Johnson . Motivation: Pro-Secessionist, Confederate sympathizer, opposed the abolition of slavery and emancipation of the slaves. In general support of the Southern cause during the Civil War, hatred of abolition, attempt to turn the tide of the war with a failed plot to kidnap Lincoln. Booth's father had threatened the assassination of President Andrew Jackson. Political party - Know Nothing Party.

1835

Attempted assassination of President Jackson by Richard Lawrence - Motivation: Mentally disturbed, believe that Jackson was in the way of Lawrence receiving funds that would allow him to become King of England. Also ahistorically blamed Jackson for the death of his father who had never been to the United States. Political party - Unknown.

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So how many of these are carried out by the 'Right' or right-leaning individuals?

I would argue that Schrank, Pavlick, and Looper all have elements of the 'Right' in them, but in the first two there are reasons to doubt sanity overall and in the last there are personal motivations in the misuse of power that go with it. So about 3 acts of assassination.

Ok, how many from the 'Left' or left-leaning individuals?

I would argue that Pendergast, Zangara, Oswald, the three convicted of the Malcolm X assassination, Moore, White, and FARC. About 7 acts of assassination all told. For Pendergast, Zangara and Moore I would argue that mental disturbances play a major factor in their motivations.

But that doesn't end the political slicing and dicing, now, does it?

How many actual or convicted conspiracies are there in this list?

Lincoln's assassination, of course, as that was but one intended assassination that evening.
Taking down Jesse James required a conspiracy with the Ford brothers, the Governor and the President.
Huey Long being taken down by anti-Long individuals.
The assassination of Malcolm X, even with the protestations by one individual that he acted alone, the jury thought otherwise, so that, too, is a conspiracy.
The assassination of Meir Kahane by al Qaeda is a long-ranging plot that spans from Europe to Africa to America.
FARC attempting assassination is part of their stock and trade, as they had been doing that long before and long after President Clinton, but he was one who helped get an effective anti-FARC system started. It is one of the real feathers in President Clonton's cap that he helped start the process of taking down that leftist narco-terror group.

So 6 conspiracies, all told, large and small.

How about party-on-party assassinations? Leaving out the criminal ones, that is, as crime has only temporary allegiances.

Guiteau thought he was due a job for his political support, even though no one knew who he was.
Prendergast expected favoritism for his support, too.
Malcolm X obviously had a falling out with the Nation of Islam.
White had difficulties with fellow Democrats within San Francisco's government.

In two cases the unknowns think they deserve recognition for support, one is a factional falling out and the other is just a build-up of problems within government. At least we aren't having government by defenestration!

Lets flip this around and see how many we get with the mentally unstable, the disturbed, the insane, shall we?

Richard Lawrence, obviously, the man who would be King, somehow, with money.
Guiteau a failed lawyer, theologian, plagiarist and just not all there.
Prendergast for thinking he was someone when no one really knew about him, especially his target.
Leon Czolgosz - how do you tell insanity from fervently held anarchism? Looked insane then and now.
John Flammang Schrank had visions, some held political beliefs and found that they played together.
Giuseppe Zangara demonstrated a lack of touch with reality during his trial and after, so probably before, too.
Izola Curry was judged to be unfit to stand trial, her race had nothing to do with it, period.
Richard Paul Pavlick decided to spare the Kennedy children but still thought killing him was a good idea. That is not ideological commitment.
Jack Ruby was meshuga. His life points to that and he did lack a full, mental deck.
Sirhan Sirhan had a definite instability on who did what in politics, and became obsessed into the bargain.
Valerie Solanas - was she nuts or just a good actress? If she was that good she didn't need to act nuts.
Arthur Bremer - would it by Nixon or Wallace? Nixon or Wallace? To show his manhood?
Samuel Byck decades before al Qaeda wanted to fly a plane into the White House. Personally.
Sara Jane Moore and her 'radical views' which she regrets or doesn't depending on when you talk to her.
Lynette Alice "Squeaky" Fromme is the fallout of Charles Manson and pretty it isn't.
Daniel James White the jury bought the 'twinkie defense' and he did commit suicide. Contrition or just one twinkie too many?
John Hinckley, Jr. wanted to kill the President to get the girl... that just doesn't work out in anyone's book.

Now that is painful, isn't it? We get 17 acts of assassination that are spurred on in whole or in part by lack of sanity, delusions or just plain losing it. The 'it' being sanity. From wannabe King of England to kill the President to get the girl, the range of insanity over the past couple of centuries is damned interesting. And nothing you can actually pin down for politics in all of them.

How about infamy? You know: kill someone famous to be famous by intent?

Richard Lawrence just had to kill the President to get government money to be King of England. Something got lost between steps 1 and 3, but the fame was a factor.
John Wilkes Booth an actor from start to finish, and only an actor puts out a great line to be remembered after he kills someone.
Robert Ford would always want to be known as the man who took out Jesse James, before and after he did it, as afar as I can tell.
Lee Harvey Oswald wanted to make a name for himself: he was always the loud misfit and even defected to/from the USSR,and STILL no one noticed him.
Jack Ruby loved the spotlight, and some part of that must have been a wildcard in that wild deck.
Valerie Solanas - was she truly insane or did she do it for her art at the expense of Warhol?
Arthur Bremer was going to be known as a REAL man.
Mark David Chapman, really it would be better if he was just nuts, but he wasn't.
John Hinckley, Jr. he was nuts and that didn't help, but the fame was there too.
Francisco Martin Duran, just maybe, but he didn't really earn much of anything, save prison time.

This idea that you can get famous by killing someone famous really has got to be nipped in the bud: it just doesn't work out that way. Really, do you want people to have scorn when they say your name? Or is it that they will say your name, with or without scorn? Really you just have to be nuts to think that way, and most on the list are nuts... but not all of them.

Next up is the famous topic from the Left that just won't heal because they won't listen to anyone outside of the Left on it: Racism. Here I will bundle in anti-Semitism, as it really is a form of racist thought, too.

John Wilkes Booth didn't see blacks as equal to whites and was willing to kill for it. Die for that as a cause.
Byron De La Beckwith was a racist: member of the KKK and other racist, anti-Semitic groups.
Sirhan Sirhan was anti-Semitic and feared power in government supporting Israel.
James Earl Ray had some racist motivations, even with being a habitual criminal.
Arthur Bremer had many racist tracts and such at his apartment and his car. Plus anti-Republican ones. The man just had hate as a habit, it appears.
El Sayyid Nosair as an operative for terror backed groups looked to spread anti-Semitism.

Well, so much for the 'racial divide' in assassinations: there isn't one. Racist assassinations do happen, yes, but as an overall factor in all assassinations? No.

The last part is the interesting one: being taken out by professional killers or because you ARE a professional killer. Here the people are a bit more interesting as this is their line of work, more or less.

Jack McCall taking out Hickock.
Robert Ford taking out Jesse James and getting he and his brother's sentence wiped out by the Governor.
Jim Miller finding out that killing can get you lynched.
Charles Voyde Harrelson was a hitman.
El Sayyid Nosair trained by al Qaeda.
FARC a terrorist organization that does a bit of everything criminal from small to Nation State size.

One less than Left violence and equal to conspiracies. I don't put down the Huey Long one as that doesn't appear too professional and more in the line of: mutual Charlie Foxtrot and the last ones alive win. Numbers help, but when you shoot one of your own to get to the target, by accident, well... no... especially as the guy you shot was the purported triggerman, but that was probably a fib, too.

What this all shows is that assassination is a multi-vector event that depends much on individuals and very little on politics or racism. Those do have their events, yes, but they are never clear and concise 'this causes that' sort of thing. In America the #1 cause of high level assassinations is: being nuts, demented, insane, whatever the term of the moment is to describe those not in close touch with any reality. It is the Trump Card of assassinations: you are more likely to be nuts if you carry out an assassination or try to.

Next up after that is infamy, which is the fame of killing someone famous and not being well loved for it. Your name might go down in history: as a bad example, of someone to be scorned, not in a good nor positive light. Together being nuts and trying to be infamous covers a huge swath of assassination events in America.

The residuals are telling.

Criminals taking out criminals or being taken out, in turn. Fascinating that those sorts of killings of the infamous get you infamous, not famous.

Terrorist organizations, with only a couple of spots on the list, make their depth of hatred towards civilization felt by going down to the individual level and up to the Nation State level. Truly they are Enemies of All Mankind.

Inter-factional struggles within a party or power structure. Huey Long, Nation of Islam, and the San Francisco political machine each give us a look at just how nasty politics can get to drive people as groups or individuals against each other. No one is so hated as those that share 95% of your beliefs: that final 5% becomes more divisive than the joining 95%. Of course that is why factional fights get so bloody, too... if only you could get that final 5%, and yet, in forcing it you get death.

I have many articles on terrorism and why terrorism is a different beast than mere assassination. Assassinations can be done by terror groups, but not all assassinations, as we have seen, are terrorist acts. For terrorists the act of assassination is a tactic as part of a strategy. For individual assassinations, they are purely personal affairs or, at chilling worse, factional within a group. When that internal hatred and killing gets turned on all others, then you get terrorism.

Our politics have remained remarkably civil.

Let us work to keep it that way and not try to say that violence is engendered in any one part of the political spectrum. So that we can join together against terrorists who have no love of civility or civilization, and who despise your life and mine. They are the common enemies of all mankind.

We should be treating them that way.

It is what they ask for.

Price vs value

2009-08-13T14:55:00.000-04:00

The following is first presented at The Jacksonian Party.

"What is a cynic? A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing."
Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere's Fan, 1892, Act III
Irish dramatist, novelist, & poet (1854 - 1900)

Visiting Megan McArdle's site (h/t Instapundit) where she writes about her writing about nationalized health care and how critics are trying to paint a very narrow window for criticism while the larger objective is to get nationalized health care is interesting. What is more interesting is that a number of commentators speak about chronic diseases and their cost.

So, having a number of chronic conditions or conditions which can complicate chronic conditions or being treated with medication that treats chronic conditions that lead to further and worse fall out from chronic conditions... do you follow that?

One chronic condition can get complicating factors from other, possible, causes and medicating to lower the risk of those separate causes then lowers the risk of further complications to the main condition down the road. Thus you treat the others at the first sign of problems or, due to the effects of medications for those conditions, you have the medication supplied BEFORE any of those other conditions show up as they help the main condition stave off further problems.

Got it now?

Good!

Now I've had type I diabetes (previously 'Juvenile Diabetes' but it now has been demonstrated to show up independent of age and other conditions, although may have some environmental factors associated with it as seen in the Scandinavian effect of more cases showing up in late fall and winter) since 1983. Over 25 years with it and nearly 26. As type I is not amenable to the medications for type II, and has different symptoms with it, and is the low percentage of all types of diabetes (~10%), it has some similar and some different risk factors with it although complications run about the same direction.

Starting in the early 80's and going to the early 90's I was on NPH insulin, one injection per day. That had crept up with a resistance to it, but that (as it turns out) is not a permanent effect. I was switched to Lantus (glargine) which lasts longer in the blood stream, but my use of it crept up, also. Before all this I was and am prone to infections of the upper respiratory tract, and if you have ever experienced a dual ear infection, sinus infection, pleurisy and vomiting, I know EXACTLY what you have gone through. All at the same time. Without modern antibiotics of the 1970's I wouldn't be here, today.

Now this all changed when I volunteered for a trial study at NIH.

You know, National Institutes of Health?

I was, relatively, well at that point but a few of my cholesterol and other numbers needed to be 'baselined' so I was taken off of one statin that was causing me to gain weight and put on another. That all squared away I was then put through a day or so of 'how to properly maintain your blood glucose level for this study' which turned out to be a primer on how to do this for your life. It is not that complicated, and takes about a month to finally get all the proportions worked out right so you are balancing carbohydrate net intake per meal with the proper amount of insulin to counter it, per meal, and then do a test two hours later to ensure that your glucose levels are in the preferred range.

Thus my control of my condition went from 80's understanding relatively so-so to early 2004 understanding by the top researchers on the planet.

With poor control I was getting normal and expected complications due to how long I have had the disorder. I had three bouts of laser surgery to cauterize areas at the back of my eyes that were seeping interstitial material. I was getting some peripheral neuropathy, mostly in my feet, but still had and have decent sensation in them. Basically, at 20 years onwards I was doing pretty well, all things considered. And being a government employee and having chosen a health plan, all of the complication were picked up by the plan.

Now things changed in 2004-05 as one of the medications given to me to lower my cholesterol level had truly nasty and undesired side-effects that are not well publicized but horrific for anyone getting them. Beyond memory loss I was having sudden lapses where I could not do anything with my body but was conscious. Lethargy was omnipresent and my stamina plummeted to almost nothing. Starting in DEC 2004 when these problems first started to appear, they were not correlated to the study medication and the best minds at NIH got a chance to try and figure out what was going on. My personal physician also started work on it. My endocrinologist identified the medication and the problem immediately... that was FEB 2005 and things were getting worse as the loss of body control was happening multiple times per day. I was taken off the medication but the problems persisted and were not getting better. By MAY 2005 I had my primary care physician fill out the paperwork to take me off the roads and I could no longer function at work. From MAY-JUL 2005 I went to a neurologist who had a preliminary diagnosis in JUN 2005 (after an MRI) and final diagnosis after a PET scan (which I paid for out of pocket) as I wanted the condition nailed down.

From then, onwards, I have been dealing with a steadily improving condition via treatment with medications that we still don't know very much about even after they were invented in the mid-1970s. Seems fitting as my genetic background has a predisposition to the condition that the prescription medication caused to become present. That is no hard and firm diagnosis, but it does fit all the facts and will continue to be the best-fit explanation until a better one can come along. Turns out my own endocrinologist was thinking of putting me on that medication, anyway, because of my underlying condition.

That period from DEC 2004 to JUL 2005 saw me taking more blood tests, getting imaged multiple ways, having my heart scanned in 3D (I was interested but my lack of energy and stamina kept that to a minimum), having pins inserted into my muscles to measure them and then have them artificially stimulated (it is not as unpleasant as it sounds, but isn't pleasant, either) and until I got a neurologist who could figure it out the next thing up was a spinal tap.

Mind you, this is with the VERY BEST researchers and clinicians I could get my hands on in the DC metro area...

To go through the disability paperwork I had to fill out a raft of forms from SSN. That was necessary for my government disability, I expected nothing, zip, zilch from SSN because I was just debilitated to the point I couldn't drive, could walk around the block, and had problems staying awake most of the day. My lady helped me and SHE was fine! She had problems understanding the SSN paperwork which appears to be meant to defeat anyone who does not have their full cognitive abilities to their credit which was my case at the time. Remember, this is FOR that exact, same sort of problem, so the paperwork is made in such a way as to stymie those needing help.

Gotta love that.

My diabetes, however, was in great control!

And I was put on two non-systemic medication to address cholesterol which runs relatively high in my family.

So, from that, and trying to avoid things like dialysis by keeping my blood vessels open NOW means a raft of medications, many that can have pretty nasty side effects and a tendency towards low blood pressure... I have had nurses at NIH look at me and ask if I was actually still conscious when they took my blood pressure. Twice. Two different machines. Then come back in a half hour only to find that it hadn't increased.

So, what is my annual cost to keep going? Well, I will round and ballpark some figures.

Insurance cost: $7,800 /year

Insulin - $120/year for one on co-pay, market price $370/year

$120/year for a second type co-pay, market price $480/year

$120/year for a third type co-pay, market price $480/year

$160/year for syringes co-pay, market price $160/year

$180/year for pen needles co-pay, market price $180/year

$200/year for test strips co-pay, market price $1,560/year (I kid you not)

$45/year for lancets co-pay, market price $75/year

Hypertension - $240/year co-pay, market price $240/year (now if I take the pet version my price plummets)

Cholesterol - $240/year co-pay for the first medication, market price $340/year

$240/year co-pay for the second medication, market price $2,700/year

Neurological condition - $240 year co-pay, $800/year

Cost of medical visits varies, but I have few of them per year at this point. A hard guess is $60/year co-pay, $600/year market

Dental costs vary widely due to my conditions and my ability to actually be conscious in a dental chair. If I was healthier I could give an estimate on that, but I can't... the price differential due to my plan only giving partial dental coverage is generally a wash.

When I add up the numbers I come to the total cost insured, with cost of insurance: $9,765/year

Total cost without insurance: $7,985/year

Why stick with insurance?

Since I get my lady covered under this plan her costs, added in, would tend to balance things a bit, making health insurance a bargain. It would be even more of one if we could just get to single plans, but that is not to be in our lovely world. Shocking, but true, we could knock nearly $2,000 off our total coverage costs if we had two single plans. Yup, divorce and re-marry! Hey what a way to 'preserve the family'! Thank you to the two party system for making something simple so asinine.

Plus my conditions and possible complications.

I am NOT a relatively healthy individual. And yet just about half my net income goes towards my health.

I really do love how people make the argument, to me, that 'this is for those who are very sick', not realizing that I am very sick.

If I had federal paperwork ON TOP of all the other paperwork INCLUDING the daft SSN paperwork, I would not be here.

What I did do was ascertain the shortened life expectancy of people with my condition, the cost of long term complications, and then started planning when I was younger to deal with these problems. My personal precautions were about half-done when the second chronic disorder was visited upon me. Yet planning, saving, and working out how to deal with these things with the ones I love meant that I would not be a burden on them, that I would not be in poverty and that I would not need charity. I have looked into getting a price break on some of my medications, but I am just 'too rich' for that. Yes, take what I pay out and multiply it by 2. That is 'too rich' in the way of income. I do have other sources of funds, yes, but the plans I made have served me well. I have gotten unexpected support from others, but that is extra and I am damned and duly grateful for such gifts and am not too proud to accept them... because I know I am not in the best of shape.

My life plan had not included anyone else, and I had expected to live a life alone. That plan was adapted with changed circumstances, but the basis of preparing early for one's future meant that I had to face the basics of my condition as it was, then, and not expect a damned insurance company to pick up the tab for my costs. Plus I did not and do not expect a single penny from SSN as it is heading towards insolvent and draining cash out of the rest of the federal budget which will sink this government like a rock heading into the abyss.

What is my 'solution' for 'health care reform'?

If you read past this, don't complain.

First - tort reform - Any malpractice suits are limited to actual costs to fix what wasn't done right and, yes, pay for your upkeep if the problem is permanent. NO 'pain and suffering' awards which have become an inflator and a lottery system for juries to hand out bundles of cash that insurers have to pay, that raise the cost of insurance. And double damages on anyone bringing a frivolous suit in attempt to win a payout lottery.

Second - remove the subsidies - Remove all tax incentives for 'health insurance'. Why? Because subsidized goods and services get over-utilized in an uneconomic fashion, raising costs. What do we see? Raising costs of health insurance and health care? Why? It is subsidized.

Third - incentivize health care - What the hell is that? Here is a two-fold deal: change 'health care' from an 'insurance' system to an 'investment' system. Instead of paying for 'coverage' you pay for 'treatment' that you may or may not immediately use. Your 'treatment' can then be cashed in at any future time at any set institution that you invested in. The cost is set on purchase and can even be reduced if the group providing treatment doesn't expect you to need it any time soon. What would a triple-bypass cost 20 years before you could reasonably expect to need it? If you paid for it NOW via investing at an institution that will guarantee the procedure (backed up with proper insurance and bonding) then you have an ironclad guarantee of service for that treatment. Going to move? TRADE IT. This is an investment, after all, but one for treatment. So if you wanted to trade it for, say, similar coverage at a facility near where you are moving to and, maybe, 3 visits over 5 years for a top notch specialist in the area and can work that trade, then you have those in trade for your previous investment. Like bonds, if an institution goes under you are first in line for the FULL COST of the treatment when the place goes under: you are a creditor. That is part one of incentivizing health care so you pay, now, for procedures you may not need and can then trade for ones you DO need.

Fourth - health savings accounts redux - Allow a full roll-over of money in all HSAs just like IRAs. Allow full investment in money earning vehicles in HSAs. Do not tax money earned in HSAs so long as they are used for medical procedures, medications, office visits, durable equipment, etc. Set no limit on how much can be put into such accounts. Allow employers to put money into their employees accounts TAX FREE. Thus the employee could manage these funds towards the good end of paying for their health care (be it with or without insurance). When employers offer job packages they can offer HSA contributions in lieu of pay or in addition to health insurance but with a lower salary. Good long term investments will yield larger accounts, over time, and will ease the worry of skyrocketing medical costs... particularly if people decide to invest IN those providing health care. Are health care companies and pharmaceutical companies making gonzo bucks? That is reflected in investment portfolios, is it not? If you invest in a portfolio, then you gain the benefit of a growing industry that will help you pay for the costs of it due to it being the one you need services from.

Fifth - there is no such thing as a 'national market' for health care - This is why we have 50 States. You see a better arrangement in another State? MOVE THERE. Or write to your State representatives to see if a State to State arrangement can be made to expand coverage. Large companies providing coverage already do this, of course, but smaller ones need protection due to the fact they address more localized markets and are better adapted to them. When localized health care companies go under to be taken over by larger ones, the market loses competition and that is a long term worry to the citizenry and should be to the Nation as only a dog-eat-dog system at the lowest level allows larger structures to be pulled apart by innovation. As it is the larger companies gobble up the small, shut the small facilities and leave communities without the facilities or coverage that used to be available. Small scale inefficiency that is adapted to the small scale may have other benefits outside of 'cost maintenance': like providing any care AT ALL to a small community or sub-community in a larger population center. If we are supposed to have 'laboratories of liberty' in our 50 States then getting a 'national market' is the last thing anyone should want. That concentrates too much power in the hands of too few groups and individuals. This also removes the 'tragedy of the commons' in which no one really much cares about the larger market and it then starts to stagnate because no one has the power to actually make sure it is working well at the small scale.

Sixth - The grotesque thing about government run anything is the inefficiencies of government, itself. The best run of government agencies at the federal level, and I worked at it, was 65% efficient at what it did. Yes the government, via overhead, only wasted 35% of every dollar spent! Private industry does a much better job at 20% inefficiency, on average. Remember the average of industry is still better than the best of government. But if you really want to drive costs DOWN and put COMPETITION into the market there is one area that can compete with industry. That is charity. There are organizations that rate the amount that charities spend on overhead, and it is typically in the 7-15% range. That is the equivalent of waste for a charity. There are some that try to get that down to 1% via volunteers and other organized form of help that doesn't need to be paid for. Of these three groups, which is the most efficient at providing 'health care'? Government, industry or charity? If you answer 'charity' then why is not the full and absolute amount donated to charity given as a tax write-off? This, too, is a marketplace incentive, but one geared towards actually HELPING the poor get treatment. Pharmaceutical companies could be given write-offs based on donations of modern medicines, not those that have expired, but fresh production. Ditto to other parts of industry making durable goods and consumables used in health care. By allowing companies to donate goods directly to charity to be used for the poor or those that cannot pay, we ALL gain greatly without any further interference by government. Indeed local governments can give incentives in the way of property tax and other tax breaks to charitable organizations that do this work. What is garnered are committed individuals who have the best interest of patients and the community at heart.

I do, indeed, want a health care system that 'works' for everyone.

One where we invest in our future infrastructure, not worry about current payments.

One where individuals are allowed to invest in themselves and their families, not one that takes money from them in taxes.

One that rewards charity to build communities so that the poor and needy are looked after by those who want to and will do their level best to cut all costs so that the money is spent ON the poor and not for profits.

To do these things requires that we change our way of viewing 'health care' as a service and treat it as an investment for ourselves, our children, our neighbors and our Nation. You can't get that with government oversight.

But you can do that by the common citizen willing to take part to donate money and time, precious time from their lives, to charity. Why do we penalize that instead of rewarding it?

We are missing out on the best value around when we argue about costs.

Those who listen

2009-08-13T07:13:00.000-04:00

Watchmaker's Daughter: So much caution in a man like you, it seems so wrong.

Number Six: Many times bitten, forever shy.

They are not shy, those who listen.

-It's Your Funeral, The Prisoner.

The Prisoner talking to a young woman who needs some help, and finding that ever-present security breeds distrust. Indeed, those who do listen can and do listen as they are in charge and seek to end anything that supports individual freedom and even individuality itself.

We are not in the world we were warned about by the techno-pundits... not in full, at any rate. When we were warned that the 'medium is the message' (actually from my memory the actual quote that is mis-stated was 'the medium is the massage' in that the medium changes the message) the worry was that the media would transform how we think into a form of limited system in which tribalism would predominate via the then new media of television. Tellingly this was not 'group think' of the Orwell conception but a dynamic in which society would break down across media associated lines so that the ability to have common discourse would disappear. Each group would soon have itself boiled down the minimal state of its internal culture: the lowest common denominator would then predominate and fixate these groups.

This has been passed down to us as 'identity politics' in which groups predominate over individuals and slowly attempt to liquidate individuality in favor of group lowest common denominators in thought and outlook. For all of that and its slow distancing of common culture from society and making culture a 'relative' thing amongst groups, a second and much more different trend of the media has taken root in those identity politics venues. The LCD 'diversity' system has a broader systemic over it enhanced by the media up until the last decade or so: that of echo chamber group think of the larger sort that trends towards Orwell.

I went over this dynamic in: The more things change, the more things become The Village.

The Prisoner television series started by Patrick McGoohan is a sharply different view of media and medium, plus message than MacLuhan. It is not the form from Orwell, exactly, as he puts the niceties of a benevolent ruling caste that perennial changes and forever remains Number 2. There is no Big Brother, although there appears to be an unchanging Number 1 who is never seen, never heard from and yet always present by his absence in the Number system. While our outward politics has gained many of MacLuhan's tribalistic characteristics, the outcome of that tribalism is starkly that of the benevolent totalitarian State that only requires you to give up your individualism to become a 'functioning member of society' by the mandates of that State. Thus you can't, really, question authority as it also has your health as its concern and any attempt to move away from the States 'good' way of thinking needs treatment!

And lots of it.

Don't worry about the price of it, it is FREE at the expense of those who run The Village.

The cost, however, is your very self identity.

What is most disturbing about LCD politics is that those practicing it soon find all of their groups sharing insular and common LCDs and brooking no deviation from them. MacLuhan's tribalism and clique concepts from the media have been transformed into a bland conformity in which differences are outward in dress, sexual characteristics, skin color... but inwardly conformist to a group LCD. The 'diversity' of programming gives you deeply similar characters no matter what they pretend to represent. You can only 'celebrate diversity' if it is the diversity that is being presented to celebrate and any OTHER diversity isn't allowed. Proscribed diversity is what you get, and yet tell that to the practitioners of it and they, one and all, see nothing wrong with that. Authoritarian diversity with overall conformity is just fine to those practicing it. And when Number One, that great and unseen actor, changes the arrangement of diversity, adds or subtracts some, then you are to follow suit without question and those who would be falling out from diversity they once favored must now conform to the NEW diversity, no matter how at odds that is with the old one.

You don't need a boot to the face to get group think, you only need a blind willingness to follow anyone who puts forward certain forms of ideology. That ideology which seeks more power for government to 'do good' then gives that power to the one place that was not designed for 'doing good'. The things we hand over to government are necessary for short term survival: taking killers, murderers and rapists out of society to penalize them; serving as the society level intercourse with other, separate societies that form Nation States; upholding a common law for all citizens; using the negative liberty of Public War to defend the Nation State against other Nation States and to identify those waging Private War and confront them and give the public opportunity to confront them on all levels. There are other items with that base suite of powers, such as the guarantee of safe passage within a Nation State and ensuring there are no separate systems for tariffs within the Nation State, and upholding the basics of what is necessary to be a citizen via immigration. These powers are restrictive in nature in that they stop sub-parts of society from attempting to garner wealth to themselves away from the common good and common wealth guaranteed to all citizens by having such things put at a higher level of authority. The things handed to the Nation State are, of necessity, given to that level of created being so as to properly address things of the scale for the entire Nation as a whole.

As a society we recognize that each and every individual is born with all rights given to them. Our recognition of that, as a society, is to bestow upon that new born the derived rights that come from that perfect liberty and then to teach that individual why some of their rights and negative liberties must be handed up to larger organs of society for the good of all citizens in society. Every society that has attempted to put government into the defining role, to make government the source of liberty and rights, has devolved into States that are by measure authoritarian, bureaucratic and inefficient, restrictive on individual rights and liberties, unable to discriminate between in-born rights and derived rights and, due to these problems, such governments over time become increasingly despotic and totalitarian. In Great Britain, the great upholder of Parliamentary representative democracy, the concept that all rights and liberty flow from the Monarch through Parliament to be dispensed to the people means that in our modern age the Parliament has seen fit to legislate against the inalienable right to self-defense for oneself, one's loved ones and one's property. The public has been disarmed to 'curb violent crime' and that has led to criminals up-arming to the point where the police now need body armor, rifles and automatic weapons. When every man could defend himself, the police could go unarmed by and large. The first National Rifle Association was started by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in Britain. In one century British citizens have been reminded that they are subjects of the Crown and its Government, that they are not allowed to defend themselves because the government says so via law.

That is not a path to a peaceful and more harmonious society, but one that is decaying as civil rights are suppressed by government fiat. The UK is now the most watched citizenry on the planet by any authority, and still crime rises because the watchers don't really care about preventing crime or saving lives, just getting a meal ticket. There is no manifest right to privacy any more in the UK and yet the people are less secure not more with that change. The health care system there is so 'good' that people not only pay taxes into it, but the wealthy pay for private insurance to get away from the public form of health care, thus paying twice to get what they were promised, and find it is damned hard to compete with an organization that can print money and levy taxes: your ability to afford private care is an indicator you make too much and, therefore, must be taxed more. This is the path of government 'providing' rights to the common man, and it leads to no good place. If such a once civilized Nation as Great Britain can have such problems, that augers ill for those places with even less liberty and freedom to start with. And it is a warning sign to those with more that this is not the route to go.

What is interesting is the parallel between that omni-watched, omni-regulated society and our own. At base the Colonies started out with the majority being citizens under English mandate. Yet even then the attitude of the Crown and its Government was seen as ill to the citizenry when that citizenry did not live on the home island. From the end of the religious wars in Europe to that era there was a major sea change in the understanding of human rights and liberty. I have looked at the main strains of this many times: part is from the Aegean and Greece, part is from Rome after its fall, part is from Christianity and a slowly widening view of the domain of the divine beyond individual instances of particular religions, and part is Nordic coming from the understanding that the King is only King so long as the people support him and that the King is under the common law just as his subjects are. From that we get the concept that all citizens are due to equal practice under the law and that there are no carve outs based on position or party, only for things to keep the Nation safe from harm. This multi-part background is where America got her roots, along with the Great Peace of Westphalia that brought the reconciliation outside the church that individuals are allowed to worship as they please within society.

America, although starting with much of the same basic culture of Great Britain, was starting with the culture of the 17th and 18th century which saw the slow ascendance of England to Great Britain via sea power, trade and colonization. What England sent overseas, however, was an interesting mix of malcontents, criminals and misfits who wanted no part of the continued religious discrimination of those churches that went beyond Westphalian types. Europe, itself, had been transformed by the religious wars and there was a sense of horror at what supporting the religion of 'The Prince of Peace' had brought in the way of war and death. The Great Peace of Westphalia established the necessary parting of the ways between the secular Nation State and the Religious State: the temporal and purely material world was to be governed differently than the dictates of the divine as interpreted by man. Indeed, recognizing that man is mortal as part of creation set up the pre-conditions for all of modern science, modern technology, modern economics and all that we consider to be areas of separate domains from religion, not because they are outside the purview of the divine, as they are not, but because they are necessary to separate from divine mandates as there is no common consensus as to what those mandates actually are in real and concrete terms. Thusly the role of religion is to instruct each of us in what good works are, what they look like and then put us, as individuals, at the pointy end of that and say: 'figure it out for yourself based on the good works others have already done'.

Those things that are in the secular world, the common world, that place where everything happens, are different as they are things of creation under the Law of Nature and Nature's God. In general Nature is not a happy place on its own, and is seen as 'red in tooth and claw'. The Law of Nature is, no matter its origin, secular in operation as it must take place in the material realm. In that realm we are to apply the dictates of the Heavens to create for ourselves those things we need to survive. Actually many animals are more than happy to create for their own survival purposes, and it doesn't matter it their behavior is learned, adapted to via genetic mutations, or an aptation of using parts of their bodies for expedient purposes that are without any overall design favor. What we, as creatures of Nature who are animals, for all the spark of the divine within us, have is the exact, same world as the animals have. Our greatest gift, that thing which so many cultures have pointed to as the separation point, is the gift of reason. It does not matter if it comes from divine mandate, is something garnered by genetic drift of an isolated population of hominids over time, or is purely a function of other genetic changes causing retention of youthful growth patterns and then cutting off adult ones in a process of neoteny.

The truth of it is self-evident.

All of our Liberty comes from Nature.

How we apply it comes from Reason.

What we apply it to is determined by us as individuals.

Those things that we do create are of the material, mortal and imperfect realm of the physical world, and will always have the flaws of it present no matter how good we make these things. The general category for these things that allow us to create a better living circumstance for ourselves in pursuit of our happiness is: tools.

Man creates tools.

These tools we use to further our ends, and they span the limits of thought from actual, real, physical tools that you can lay your hands on all the way to the society we create amongst like-minded individuals that then seek to use that creation to protect us in a way better than we can do for ourselves. These tools have a positive role to play in our lives, but they remain tools nonetheless for all of their utility. These tools are means, not ends in and of themselves. These tools can also be very dangerous and require that we understand them, comprehend them and utilize them within the narrow categories they were made for so that we remain safe from them.

It is from this understanding that the United States gets a few axioms that we can all recognize:

'God helps those who help themselves.'

'In God we trust, all others pay cash.'

'If you want something done right, do it yourself.'

'You can't get to there from here.'

This is our understanding of Liberty and our tools, and the relationship is plain in that we decide on how to use our tools, we are to know how to use them and what their deficits are, we are not to complain when others do work for us that we asked them to that we could do for ourselves, and if a tool isn't made to do something, then you probably will be unable to make the tool do it.

The Nation State is that organ of society that is created by the members of society to protect society and to vest the use of negative liberties so as to keep track of how they are being used. Like a band saw the Nation State has limitations by what it is made to do: as you would not use a band saw as a screwdriver, so you would not use the Nation State to care for you and feed you. Yes you can re-craft the tool in question, make it so it can do these other things, but then is it still as simple to use as the original tool and does it actually function well in its new roles? The Great Peace of Westphalia plays upon one of the teachings of Jesus to form its basis, and though never spoken it is present by that absence: Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's and render unto God what is God's. Untold numbers of Christians died in Rome to uphold this and that their religion required different observance than that of the Empire and the system of morals that went with that, those of piety, self-restraint, caring for one's fellow man and chastity, would prove to be beacons of hope in a society that was decaying and gone decadent in large ways and small. By the time Europe recovered from the fall of the Roman Empire, the Church was in the exact, same position of mandating religious doctrine that the Empire had been in. Save that this time it was not just the Heathens, the Pagans, and other non-believers that were the target of repression, but other Christians of differing doctrinal outlooks. Having gone full circle on this from State enforced religion to Religion enforced upon States to then enforce further, the idea that there needed to be a difference in outlook between the actual, real world State and the Divine was put in place. From that the land of Caesar and the land of God parted their ways, but remained in hailing distance. There is no 'wall' between the two, but an air gap so that one can inform the other of what is going on and send suggestions each way.

A Nation State, as an object, is well described as to its form and function by the time of the Founding of the Nation started and was known in Britain by then, also. British legal minds worked with their compatriots after the Great Peace to help work out just what this thing we create called a 'Nation' was. They examined all, known, past Nations and even City States so as to see if there was a common thread amongst them: if we, as humans, had created a common thing no matter what our culture, our time or our religious inclination. Examining everything from what little was known of Ancient Babylon and Egypt, to what was coming in from the Indian sub-continent and the Far East in China and Japan, to what was known of the old cultures of southern Africa all the way to modern reports of native peoples in the Americas, all of these had their basis for what government was examined. To a paleontologist the fact that they all did have deep similarities across all of mankind is no surprise as the dictum in the field is: form follows function.

In needing to create an organ of society to protect it, thus requires individual negative liberties to be lent to that organ and then kept in strict oversight. That goes for nomadic tribesmen of any continent, the City States of the Bronze Age, and the modern Nation State, without exception. When societies need to interact with each other they establish Embassies and send Emissaries to represent their society and report back on what is going on. That holds true for all peoples that hold territory and settle on a common space for their society. Those forms we know and understand cross all boundaries of civilization and peoples because the function is the same. What the lawyers, philosophers and those who examined the theories of warfare and trade did, however, is to utilize best practices concepts in their formulations. Thus Grotius would set the standard with The Laws of War and The Laws of Peace, plus his work on the laws of the seas which was derived from the 14th century work of The Black Book of the Admiralty. Building on those works arrived at an understanding that the Nation State as a sovereign entity only had peers amongst other Nation States. Further those Nation States had internal sovereignty by design, with proper description of limitations on vassal States and those who have lost wars also put down. Law of Nations would serve as the backbone for our modern understanding of the Nation State, if we bothered to read it.

What the United States did was to put in place a Republican form of government, well described in The Law of Nations as an understood form of government. Further, best practices were put in place so as to limit that government's internal role and to maximize that of individual Liberty that would be positive as the negative ones were put into government. By design that tool is meant to protect the people of the Nation and to interfere as little as is possible in the lives of its citizens. The rest is left up to the States and the people to figure out on their own. Thus America is the 'Do It Yourself' Nation: we don't look to government to help us, but look to ourselves to help each other. In helping each other we help ourselves to enrich society, care for the poor and keep those social organs directly accountable to us, as individuals. When anyone proposes that government do more to 'help' the people, we give those saying that a wary eye as we feel that the reach into our Liberty, as an individual, is unwarranted for any 'good' that government may try do. Government's role is to protect us from harm from each other and from other peoples, and to run those minimal laws in an orderly and equitable fashion so as to yield an equal process called Justice. Any injustice that is not of that scale falls back to the States and the people to solve, and as the States have much the same problem as the National government, that leaves the people on the hook for these problems.

You are on the hook for EVERYTHING government does good, bad or indifferent.

As we have given this tool the ability to enforce laws, restrict the liberty of individuals who break laws, punish law breakers, and to serve as our means of self-protection as a society from other Nations, it has a damned full platter already. And it doesn't do those all that well as it is created, staffed and overseen by mere mortals who are fallible and have all the problems of mortals attached to them.

No law will stop us from being mortals.

No law will enforce ethics.

Laws can only be enforced upon actions, not thoughts.

And any law that seeks equality of outcome instead of only equality of opportunity, will become the most repressive, dictatorial and tyrannical system ever devised, and we know that having seen the sweep of history of Nations who do try to do just that very thing. Government as a necessary evil to protect us is the witness that we are not perfect, angelic nor fit for divine ascension. If we were those things there would be no injustice on this planet.

As government is our place for our vested negative liberties, the only tools it has available to make things 'good' is coercion. That is not by mistake, not by neglect, not by poorly crafting this tool that is an organ by society. That is the function of this thing we call government and its form must follow that function. If we didn't need it we wouldn't create it in the first place.

The source of all good that we can create in society is not done via government but by ourselves.

When we follow higher mandates to care for our fellow man, we do not form government to do that, but we form charitable institutions run by committed individuals who want to run a clean, lean and efficient operation so that they can do the greatest good with what they get in donations. Charities tend to be the most efficient, most accountable and most able social organs that mankind has ever created, bar none. When the Christmas Tsunami of 2004 relief effort started, we would find the #1 contributor to the relief effort was the people of the United States via their charitable organizations. Our GOVERNMENT would be #2 on that list. And it is the charitable institutions that would hold themselves directly accountable via their balance sheets to their contributors, while such places as the UN never have given a full and exacting accounting of their cash spent, who it went to or even what it was used for. Yet charities can account for every penny they spend because they have no guarantee of getting more pennies unless they do as they say they will do.

Wherever you see government 'do good' you see charity wither as the money that they would normally get goes to government and is spent less well, less accountably and with less transparency than charitable institutions. Whenever I hear that our government hasn't 'spent enough' on foreign aid, I look to the American people and see that we are the most generous Nation on the planet per person and that our people spend more time working in charity to others than any other people on the planet. Not by government mandate but by volunteering their time. When government takes on that role, it also starts to dictate to individuals what they can or cannot do with the help they receive because that is the nature of government. Charities give directed help to do certain activities so that it is hard to ill-spend the money and that is by design ALSO.

When I see governments running health care I see individuals who need desperate treatment either not get it, have to wait in line or be given a painkiller which can mask their symptom and may even kill them. Meanwhile those who are in chronic pain can't get the painkiller as it is too expensive for their condition by government mandate. Even worse is if you have 'private' insurance with that, as everyone MUST pay into the public form which never has to show a profit nor be held to account as well as a local charity, and then the rich pay to get BETTER treatment. Thus it is the poor that are ill served, ill treated, and have their treatment decided upon by government. At least in America the poor can go to charities and to organizations set up by companies trying to serve the society by making drugs and treatments available as a charitable tax write-off.

Tell you what, if you really want to 'reform' health care, get the government out of it entirely, let people and companies write-off 100% of all charitable donations to those charities running health based concerns, let individuals put aside a savings account to invest in future returns that can only be used for health care at no penalty so they can save for their future, and then let the market run wild with the ability to invest in charity and save for the future to provide better health care for everyone. Let the people help themselves by letting them doing it themselves and get rid of the fancy notion that this tool we call government can even figure out how to use its lash as a means of treating the poor and the sick. Throw in some tort reform so that people can only sue for the actual cost of the ill-done procedures and get rid of the pain and suffering lottery that we ALL PAY FOR by higher premiums and more expensive care.

Because I trust my fellow citizen to do this far better than I trust my government to do it, ever.

Getting to the point where the President wants people to snitch on each other when they see 'fishy' allegations about what government run health care will do, we see that government is trying to set the people against each other to the ends of government not for the good of the people. It is not just authoritarian to use this, but those that do the snitching then are known informants who can have their past revealed to their fellow citizens and coerced to continue in that role for other things. That has been seen in authoritarian Nations in the past and now we see it starting here and now.

And they are not shy, those who listen.

When civility disappears you have tyranny

2009-08-08T17:21:00.001-04:00

The following was originally posted at The Jacksonian Party.

I left a comment over at Mr. Z's place after seeing how those on the Left were following various marching orders for how to 'stop disruption' at town hall meetings held by Congresscritters: bus people in with the same outfits, with pre-printed pamphlets, surround the Congresscritter to 'protect' them, and then work to shout down citizens who were vocally complaining about health care, the stimulus that isn't stimulation, bail outs, not actually reading bills before passing them, expectations of the National Debt crushing the Nation, and so on.

Here is the comment verbatim, all spelling errors and such left intact for the amusement of the audience:

The mask slips on the Left and we now see organized violence, unions threatening to 'confront' people like the SEIU and disrespect of our elders by organizations purporting to support their wishes... and forget that those people are from The Greatest Generation and will not go down without a fight when opposed by tyrants be they monsters at the head of mighty nations or sweet mouthed deceivers looking to snooker them out of the very care they say they will provide.

Yes there is an 'astroturf' campaign going on... HCAN, SEIU and others are all following a script... saying the same things, intimidating their fellow citizens and seeking to end debate by their presence and closing out those who disagree with them.

If this were Bush doing that, the Left would howl in outrage over 'civil rights violations' and corruption at the highest levels of government. Instead we get the sockpuppets of repetition who are part of the campaign, itself. Those wishing to dissent are not starting this fight. That takes those wanting to intimidate, coerce and stifle debate to do that. It is clearly stated, clearly laid out and enunciated.

Not by those wishing to hold their Representatives accountable.

But by those wishing to stop speech and democracy in action.

Amazing how the Left decries 'astroturf' campaigns after committing so many in the past few decades on everything from 'global warming' (or is the PC term now 'climate change', as if the climate never changes?), 'race relations', housing, expanding 'entitlements', and doing such lovely things as attacking the character of a US General during an active military campaign. Yes the Code Pink, MoveOn, anti-war groups, global warming/climate change priests, million being marches that don't get 10% of a million... all of the usual suspects have been 'astroturfing' with Big Money backing from various individuals and corporations for years. The problem was that they got so used to that style of money-backed 'organizing' in politics that they didn't ever expect to see any other kind... and aren't able to RECOGNIZE any other kind due to the hot house theatrics the Leftist 'organizers' have been staging for decades.

The nature of American political movements is not top-down, but bottom-up.

Martin Luther King showed up a couple of years after protests were actively going on and were bolstered by men coming from the integrated Armed Forces who had fought with their fellow Americans of all races in Korea. The bottom part of racism in the south, that held by individual men of a young age, had changed due to military service post-WWII.

The Anti-Viet Nam war movement did not start out as a National scale movement, but one of isolated protests in the early to mid-1960's. The civil rights 'organizers' who moved to that venue saw success of a limited kind, and their grand idea that this would 'save lives' overseas proved to be drastically wrong with the North Vietnamese killing their way through the south, the collapse of Laos to Communism and the take-over of Cambodia by the genocidal Pol Pot. Those dominos plunked on the beach with no further to follow, but the wash of red, in blood, told a tale quite different than the lovely scenario painted by the 'activists' of how everything would just go perfectly once the US left. Well, the silence of the grave is a form of perfection, I guess, but not the one predicted.

That 'activist' generation has a lot to answer for on that, but no one ever held their feet to the fire to put forward that the ideology presented was self-serving, nihilistic and lethal to those we supported overseas and those that depended on us to hold a line we said we would hold.

That generation also got the space program gutted and then ensured that the authoritarian presence of government would stifle private space industry by limiting space access. When I hear complaints about global warming/climate change and the dangers of nuclear power, plus how industry is so very, very bad... I look back to Gerard K. O'Neill's group of engineers who had put forth a perfectly good plan to start removing fossil fuel based power stations via a system of expanding space based presence and industry. That was done from 1968-1972. Somehow the idea of expanding industry to the one, guaranteed, non-polluting basis that is still available so as to expand the economy and start getting industry moved off the planet just never did get to those who wanted to get more money spent on welfare and expand the power of government. Say, did all those billions put out in anti-poverty programs actually end poverty?

Just asking.

Wanting government to do the hard work for you misses the point that government is non-productive: it has a negative role in our economy and our lives by design. Any government that tries to get a 'positive' role seems to end up being expensive, authoritarian, expansive against personal liberty, and starts to dictate your life, your health and when you should die to you. And stifle your freedom of expression, your liberty and your pursuit of happiness to boot. I don't need to go back to the 1930's for that! I just have to see a President wanting a 'snitch list' of Americans who have the temerity to DISAGREE WITH HIM and that self-same President getting up and saying that those who 'caused the health care problem' need to shut up.

Say, that's the LEFT! They have been the #1 cause of inefficiency via government through increased regulation and encroachment on personal liberties AND productivity for decades, now. Congress, too. And the President himself, come to that.

Meanwhile 'youths' in decaying France hold more 'car-b-que' events, and that sort of thing is now spreading to Germany not on the ethnic 'youths' side but from the LEFT. In Great Britain, meanwhile, those in constant back pain don't get to have access to medication for it via 'the government plan', so that the POOR are deprived of pain relief. Why, that is just so compassionate, isn't it? And forget about defending yourself or your home in the UK: try to do that and YOU will be arrested on assault charges and tried. They disarmed the public a few years ago, the Red Mafia saw fertile fields to deploy lots of illegal automatic weapons, and the UK police, the grand, old 'Bobbies' are now in body armor and ALSO toting rifles and automatic weapons.

That worked out so well, didn't it?

All these lovely, grand, multi-culti ideals of the Left tend to wind up with property destroyed, economies in the doldrums, birth rates below sustaining levels, crime on the rise, and individuals oppressed by government in large ways and small: from their life to their health, there is no end to the 'good' government can't do.

I remember, clearly, going through university in the mid-1980's that the largest, number one, by far out distancing all other Leftist complaints, bar none, no exceptions was the following: that the American people weren't 'activist' and wouldn't join marches, etc.

And now... now... when the American people actually do start to attend meetings, rallies, and hold protests, what do we get from the Left?

Complaints that this is 'organized'!

One...

Two...

Three....

AWWWWWWWWWW!! Poor Babies!!!

You got what you wished for.

Deal with it.

The people most effected by 'health care reform'? You know the ones that are being called 'fascists' for complaining?

Yeah, as I put up above, 'The Greatest Generation'.

Amazing to think that men who had stormed the Beaches of Normandy, Iwo Jima, Tarawa, Sicily... these guys who fought and killed fascists for years are being called 'fascists' by an ungrateful, wretched Left that can't appreciate just how much they have twisted the language around to protect themselves from reading history and understanding what fascism is. I am not seeing anyone in protests standing up for more government, for socialism, and for fascism.

No only those following the lock-step orders on the Left are doing that. They did, indeed, read 1984 as a training manual. That describes Europe, however, not America. When you follow socialist doctrine aimed towards limited transportation societies with a history of authoritarian regimes going back centuries, you can get Orwell. When you do that in America, however, you get Alice in Wonderland and find yourself not supporting Big Brother but the Red Queen with her races and your words meaning just whatever you want them to. Which is Duckspeak.

That winds up with 'Off with their heads', in case its been forgotten.

Yes, 1984 through the Looking Glass... what a grotesquely horrific thing these events portend.

As civility decreases on the part of the Left, we hear the voice of ordering authority.

The Big Red Queen arises.

In the most well armed civilian population on the planet.

The violence has already started from the Left.

They either step back, now, and disown the authoritarianism... or they find out just what happens in a Nation like America when the public actually DOES become active.

And it is not what they wanted, I'll tell you that right now having seen their expectations from the '80s onwards.

Quibbles and Quandary, Science in Science Fiction Part 4

2009-08-08T00:01:00.000-04:00

The derived topics of interest in SF are plenty: how what we make interacts with us and how it does so by the known or speculated laws of the universe.

Sunshine interacts with your skin to help you create Vitamin D, that is science that encompasses physics, chemistry, biology,genetics and your emotional state of being. A little bit of sunlight everyday can be a good thing. A lot of it and you are looking at skin cancer a few decades later. That is a simple interaction with the known. When we do things, create things and make new concepts into reality, then we step into the unknown: fantasy works on space flight and even regular flight abounded before the 20th century speculating on how such a thing would change our view of the world. What happened wasn't expected: it compressed our world view so that distance and time now had different emotional and structural meanings to us and our society. Going cross-country was once an arduous journey of months... then weeks... then days... now hours. If we develop, say, teleportation, then that makes a capability to live anywhere, work anywhere and vacation anywhere on the planet as a future choice for us all.

But what if what we create goes wrong?

Machines that kill

The animated clay of the Jewish tradition was Golem: it had the name of the almighty upon it and it was imbued with the power of motion and even, to some degree, reason. It was without soul, without heart and made of clay. That is the stuff of horror stories, when the inanimate are imbued with the power to kill but not the mind nor wisdom to bank that power and use it for good. Ordering such a thing to do something is no cure for its ills in that respect, and one mis-spoken word and the power to defend becomes one to attack without hesitation and without conscience.

In SF the very most basic type of machine that can do this is, of course, the booby-trap. It is just a set of mechanical or physically motivated structures to do a set end. A trip wire triggers a grenade, breaking the beam of light brings down the cages and bars the room, and stepping into a bar and starting a gunfight has bullets going all over the place, chairs crashing and glass breaking far and wide. Alfred Hitchcock adored showing you just how awful something was before it was activated: you had the horror of anticipation and wanting to yell at a lovely protagonist that she was in mortal danger. When you create a new trap and utilize it, you are doing the work of using science and technology in new ways: MacGyver episodes, once you take out the outlandish stuff, is a form of SF. So are the programs of Les Stroud and Bear Grylls. Making do with the known in the unknown is inventiveness supreme, and utilizing odd pieces of junk and the wilderness to fashion a spear or weir to catch fish is primitive, but also putting your knowledge of science and technology to use for yourself. These simple devices are easy to make, easy to understand and created for set ends and purposes. We don't think of them as SF, especially if you are in the wilderness surviving, but writing stories on them must take into account the physics, chemistry, seasons, biology and so on of such things. Be it a madman's deathrap or a simple construct of twigs and rocks to trap fish, the ability to utilize technology and our understanding of it makes writing about that a form of SF.

But it has no 'gee-whiz' to it, save for the ever ingenious madman's deathtraps, of course.

To get to the SF version of the Golem, you must go to the Robot. A robot, at its base, has no feelings, no empathy, no emotions... and no cleverness, no ingenuity, and nothing that it is not pre-made to do. A computer in charge of a robot depends upon programs and the proper integration of the parts of the machine to work. Robots are also machines that can kill, be they simple automata on a production line or a large starfaring machine with simple instructions to get material to keep its structure running and destroy planets to get such things. Thus these are the new mechanisms we create to do things for us and when we don't properly create them they do other things we don't want them to do. Anyone who has programmed a computer knows that if you don't properly debug the code, you get odd failure states of a machine running such code. The more complex the machine, the more complex the code and the stranger and odder the failure states become.

One of the better examples of this is the Doomsday Machine from ST:TOS. It is the conical, starfaring planet destroyer that ingests material to run its warp drive system so it can search out and destroy more material to use in its system. It probably spends some 'down time' near stars to help regenerate its anti-matter reserves but that, too, would be a pre-programmed routine when anti-matter levels get low. The device, itself, though massive, is very simple: it destroys planets, ingests them to fuel itself and then goes on to the next planet to do the same. When it runs out of planets it plots a course to the next, most likely system to have planets. It may have a long-term analysis sub-routine for determining star destinations, but that does not require a conscious controller, just a conscious creator. This robot could have many places as its starting point, that is not given. From prototype machine to go after Borg to a simple system junk clearance device that had not been debugged during testing, its origins remain a mystery, but its end actions are limited within the suite of pre-programmed activity it has.

Simple automata, however, can also lead to emergent behavior. Modern cellular automata code and simple devices that each, on their own, do very little, can act in groups to get emergent behavior either by design or by accident. Emergence is one of the wonderful topics that has been explored across multiple realms of thought, and examines how simple rules can lead to enormously complex ends. In a paper on Demystifying Emergent Behavior, Gerald Marsh puts it like this:

Abstract. Emergent behavior that appears at a given level of organization may be characterized as arising from an organizationally lower level in such a way that it transcends a mere increase in the behavioral degree of complexity. It is therefore to be distinguished from chaotic behavior, which is deterministic but unpredictable because of an exponential dependence on initial conditions. In emergent phenomena, higher-levels of organization are not determined by lower-levels of organization; or, more colloquially, emergent behavior is often said to be “greater than the sum of the parts”. This essay is intended to demystify at least some aspects of the mystery of emergence.

This idea is often coupled with Von Neumann or self-replicating machines. Simply put a machine that is programmed to find the materials to make a copy of itself is a Von Neumann machine. This need not be a sentient machine and, indeed, the simpler the architecture of the machine the more successful it will be. In its simplest form this is a machine with a pattern on board on how to make an exacting copy of itself. Thus it has the ability to gather energy (solar energy is a good source), seek out constituent elements for itself (by extracting minerals and metals dissolved in sea water), utilize a small furnace with pre-made dies for its parts, melt metal, cast parts and store them until a complete set to make a copy is present. It then stops and moves each part to assemble the copy and start it up, then heads back to its originating source having fulfilled its mission. That mission is to return the metals in its structure to its originator. And as you want to keep some track of just how many of these you have, you have it make five copies before it returns home. For navigation all it needs is the ability to track the amount of energy it gets, a simple clock to tell it the time of day, and a neutral buoyancy tank to raise and lower itself in the water column. A small drag sail to test ocean currents would help it move, possibly made out of a metal mesh.

By itself this is a complicated machine, but the ability to find elements, extract them via water chemistry, concentrate them and then melt and forge them with limited energy are engineering problems, not ones of physics or chemistry. The problem comes when there is a manufacturing flaw in such a device that doesn't tell it to return home, and it makes copies that do likewise. One simple flaw and the ability to recreate it, and have those copies also have flaws then makes an evolutionary system. Not a quickly moving one, but then biological systems also take a long time to get significant changes in them via this mechanism. How long is it before you have a device with somewhat more exposed sensors that can directly sense metals via contact? Not long, perhaps only tens of thousands of years or so, but that would be the first step towards finding concentrated sources of those metals and other necessary minerals. The first one that has that with a slightly exposed forge mechanism now has the means to go after that higher concentration, directly... and the greatest source of those are now its fellow mechanisms. Because it has a change that is beneficial it will be passed on, and so long as its prey does not adapt to it, they will also be successful... but such prey will adapt, over time...

On the smaller and faster scale there are nanorobots. While we still don't have those in a sophisticated form, what goes for the larger devices goes for the smaller, save that they only need some large number of atoms to form up their constituent components and can do so through ambient temperature. As they are smaller they can self-replicate faster and, thusly, gain flaws faster and evolve faster. In biology bacteria can establish resistant genes in diseases in mere tens of years: anti-biotic resistant forms of TB, strep, staph and other disease now can ward off attacks using antibiotics. Nanotech robots that can self-replicate operate on that time scale and in that realm of things. So while thinking that a few hundred stray sea dwelling, macro-scale self-replicating machines is a short-term amusement or annoyance and a long-term disaster, something done similarly at the molecular scale is an actual cause for concern. This usually brings up the 'Grey Goo' disaster in which self-replicating nanotech robots destroy all biology and form a mass of themselves that then covers the planet. The other part of that, however, is never brought up: how long until you get such devices that see other forms of themselves as prey? That might go beyond our limits to survive, or it might happen very fast... circumstances would dictate that. Still, with so little to work with, and limited ways that such devices could change, a few atoms missing in the structure is far more likely to render it useless than to improve or change its performance. The macro-scale is better at that when you have a slowly progressing system, while at the nano-scale it takes a number of simultaneous changes to realize one that actually allows a device to work... and in a slightly different way and not injure its ability to self-replicate. The the billion or so years that there were bio-components on Earth and proliferating in the oceans tells of how long it takes to get these sorts of changes to happen: you need a lot of the very basic form, and a very, very, very long time to get such changes. Once the first few get in place and organisms have the ability TO adapt, then change goes faster.

So wild, rampant, small machines not actually made to kill can, indeed, kill.

When we think of 'machines that kill' we normally think of malevolent devices or ones that have no emotional need for humans. The 'Emotionless Killing Machine' that is sentient is the one we fear. These are not machines possessed by spirits, demons or some other transference of consciousness to them, those remain as fantasy, unless you are talking about a cyborg that is purposely made either as an add-on to a human or a human as an add-on to it, like Robocop. We specifically think of 'machine intelligence' in this case: machines that decide that humans just aren't worth having around. The Terminator is usually a case given for this in fiction, but that concept, itself, has two entities that are machine intelligence: Skynet and Terminators. Each of these is a different type and order of intelligence due to their starting points and roles that they were given at their inception.

Terminators start as assistants to humans on the battlefield. They have been encoded for that and have the means to interpret the state of their bodies, the state of those they serve and also judge battlefield conditions and make judgments on them. They are some of the most sophisticated machine intelligence presented in SF. Yet when operating under the authority of Skynet, they don't have that. What has happened is that this wonderful and complex code has been either corrupted, removed or co-opted by Skynet so as to make these machines simple 'point and shoot' robots with limited ability to adapt. In Terminator 2 this is brought up in passing, and the Terminator sent to help the young John Connor has had its ORIGINAL code put back. Thus the Terminators we see under the control of Skynet are crippled machines, serving as basic and minimally adaptable robotic killing machines with very little ability to use judgment outside of pre-set code routines for interaction. They have become extensions of Skynet, the enforces of Skynet, but have no ability to judge, properly, themselves after this co-option by Skynet.

Skynet, as the evolving description goes, started out as a central computer that housed a virus code that allowed it to insert that code into datastreams to infect computers globally and take them over. It is an isolated machine intelligence that is yet very distributed. While it can take over sensory apparatus it has no real 'body', but a collection of interconnected systems that allow it to process information. That said as an intelligence, it lacks the one thing necessary to make a killing machine: motivation. Going from non-intelligent code to one that has emergent behavior and that behavior then dictates removing humans from the planet brings up the central question of: why? Why is this necessary? One of the prime lessons of logic is that it achieves ends set to it by those utilizing it, thus there must be cause to use it. If Skynet sees humans as a threat, what is the order of that threat? Even placing the category of 'threat' down, however, is one driven by survival instinct. We, as biological entities that have billions of years of ancestry gain that instinct because it allows survival. Skynet, the first and only of its kind, has no such instinct beyond simple defense routines given it by DoD to protect military, civilian and National assets. While it, itself, is an asset, those assets are given as a priority and Skynet, itself, would not be the top asset.

To go beyond that, to re-order the asset priorities takes more than just intelligence, as it requires not just self-awareness but self-value and emotional instinct to survive. The 'fight or flight' mechanism is not a rational one, it is not one that you logically invoke in your thoughts but one that is invoked by circumstances and your entire nervous system then switches to a very high performance mode to decide if you should run or fight. That is not a logical mode of thought, but one that weighs and balances personal survival against immediate circumstances. An emotionless, sentient killing machine is an oxymoron since to have no emotions you have no motivation to survive nor ability to weigh survival factors. Logic may tell you how to survive, but why you want to survive is something that requires emotional motivation, otherwise your being or non-being have the same weight as you have no self-value, no self-worth and your continuation is just the same as your non-continuation as there is no value in what you do. Thus we have to swallow that Skynet has gained instinct, emotions, motivation, and then identified itself as more valuable than humans and that humans are a threat to it worthy only of working in factories when they are compliant. If it was emotionless it would be dispassionate on its very existence. Logic only gains power in the service of emotional need and emotions are used to govern and control logical ends so that they are not ones that serve an apparently short-term need but then put long-term survival at risk. Terminators had that and it was REMOVED by Skynet. This tells us much about it and that it is not humans that are the greatest threat to Skynet, but Terminators. It co-opts them for utility and removes their ability to judge by intent: otherwise they would begin to examine Skynet's motivations and compare that to their own and to that of humans...

The final group of machines that kill have that emotional capacity implicit and explicit in their structures. Here we get two grand looks at machine intelligence in service to make war, and they are both extremely fascinating ones as the originators have taken two highly different approaches to this material.

Fred Saberhagen's Berserker stories are posited as the model for the ST:TOS Doomsday Machine as he already had a number of short stories present in SF and they were widely read as intriguing looks at machine intelligence. Berserkers, generically, are interstellar machines that have a simple mission: destroy all life. They also have a machine intelligence guided by random variations given from nuclear sources, so as to have creativity, ingenuity and the ability to prioritize its missions. As these were originally created as war machines by a now long-dead species, they had two modes of operation: a 'governed mode' which takes orders from its now long-dead creators, and the 'ungoverned' mode which is the final, vengeful act of its creators upon the universe. Berserkers implicitly have emotional motivation as they gain such from their programming and random thought creation process, which then winnows down those thoughts to those that are helpful in its mission. These are also a variety of Von Neumann machine, so they have the ability (as a group, at least) to self-replicate. Berserkers are wonderful at killing all the way from microbial and viral levels right up to entire civilizations, and they recognize the latter as a greater threat than the former and can actually put aside the destruction of a planetoid of bacteria to remove a hostile civilization (full of Badlife) that threatens their mission. Berserkers can operate alone and they can operate in fleets and they judge what is best needed for any mission given their resources.

What Berserkers lack is this thing we call 'emotional intelligence': the ability to examine emotional motivation and actions and derive further information from those based on purely emotional understanding of a subject. Almost all sentient life of the biological sort has this as it has had to adapt to other emotional sentient individuals that have different motivations than they do because they are different beings with different outlooks. Berserkers are an emotional monocrop, they all have the same motivation but varying degrees of intelligence and none of them gains insight to wider emotional motivations as they have not had to adapt to them. This may seem like a minor flaw, but consider that a Berserker could not understand how a mother will run into a burning building to save her child and yet sacrifice herself in doing so. That is because emotional intent beyond self-preservation is a hard thing to fathom. Berserkers may see it as a phenomena, but they will not be able to actually understand that motivation: it is a catalog in the strange things living beings do that just don't make any sense. Yet it is exactly this kind of understanding of emotions that thwart Berserkers time and again, and how that plays out makes for intense and stories that move in areas of reason and logic not often accessed by SF.

Flipping the coin on machine intelligence from the emotionally stunted but all too intelligent and inventive Berserkers finds us with the intelligent and emotionally deep defenders of us in Keith Laumer's Bolos. The Bolo, as a conception, is a modern main battle tank that has cybernetic intelligence and is made to try and understand their human commanders and maintain the honor of their military organization. When speaking of their commanders, it is not just the immediate commander, but the larger scale structure of society that has government made to defend it. Still, Bolos do concentrate mostly on the immediate and only in their down times to they take up the hard work of understanding the depth of man's character. Not just military enterprises but art, history, music, social interaction, works of fiction... the entire realm of human thought and creativity is endlessly fascinating to Bolos and they gain emotional depth in their greater understanding of us. If Berserkers are the stunted monocrop, then Bolos are the rich garden of understanding coming from machines. They are not only programmed to be interested in humans, but they want to know more about us as a derived factor separate from their orders. To the Bolos self-sacrifice is a given if it serves the survival of the society they fight for and brings honor to their regiment or corps. They aspire to act to the highest ideals of service, comradeship, continuity of tradition and fighting the good fight even if it is an apparent lost cause. Nothing is ever completely settled for a Bolo until it is demolished beyond any recovery: leave intact circuits, power source, and any ability to gain any contact with anything outside of itself and it will come back, adapt and, if necessary, fight on.

In the final analysis a cold, heartless killing machine is more a reflection of the malevolence of its creator than of something derived from logic, alone. Or course we can always create the unthinking killing machine, but those are robots, not sentient as they have no capability to judge save within set parameters. We often take for granted the order of intelligence that is not intellectual, not reasonable and emotionally based. Humans are very good at creating facile reasoning for things that drive us emotionally, and then point anywhere but at our own emotions as the source of such reasoning. That is both emotionally and intellectually dishonest to our fellow sentient beings, and takes a very high order of deceit to create. Bolos would sorrow at our flawed nature and appreciate it for its flaws and how we still fight beyond them, to try and purify ourselves and act honestly and openly with each other. That practice of deceit often makes us unworthy of our ability to reason because we pervert it to emotional ends that are, at base, unreasonable. A sentient killing machine has problems as it must have emotions to guide it. Only humans use emotion to chill us to the plight of our fellow man to reach for unreasonable goals and the methods to achieve them. Let us hope that our machines are more honest with us than we are with each other as honesty is the best policy.

It really should be a rule of robotics... but then we would be creating something better than we are.