GneissGuy

Here we go folks.  Colorado is looking to put pressure on our legislators to defeat the upcoming national health care plan that is expected this summer.  This weekend Coloradoans will take aim on Betsy Markey letting her know what they think of nationalized health care.

Every citizens nightmare has happened in NY.  A man holding a firearm in the open was shot by the cops.  It is not clear if any orders were given to the man who was killed or even if the plain clothes cops identified themselves as police.  Except this time the cops got one of their own.  In an attempt to arrest a man who was breaking in to his car a NYPD officer in plain clothes was gunned down by another cop.   I think this clearly shows how readily cops are willing to shoot the civilians they are supposed to be protecting instead of taking the risk of being shot themselves. A risk that they are paid for, at least that’s what they tell us every time they want a raise.  Maybe after this cops in NY might be a little more careful about shooting the next civilian they come across with a weapon drawn, but you won’t find me holding my breath.

I am a veteran.  Or at least I was a Reservist.  I was an Airborne Infantryman before President Clinton took the combat arms units out of the Reserves.  I will not try to compare my service to that of a WWII vet or even a current vet from Iraq or Afghanistan.  Those people have actually had people out there that wanted to kill them and they have survived.   I only make the statement because I have completed Army Infantry School and Airborne School at Ft. Benning, GA. 

That qualification is important from the point of knowing what I am talking about only because I have actually been through the training.  Army training, and to an equal or lesser extent all military training, teaches soldiers to react and not think about what they need to do.  This insures the soldier does what they need to do when they are in combat.  More importantly, the Army trains soldiers to de-humanize their enemies.  This is intended to allow soldiers to kill enemy troops without remorse.  I just had a chance to see parts of the “Band of Brothers” mini-series.  I think it was a remarkable piece of work.  It also drove home the point about war that I have taken to heart over the years since I was a gung-ho, hard-driving Airborne Infantryman.  Soldiers kill other soldiers.  That is too clean, too aseptic.  More accurately, men kill other men.  US soldiers came home from WWII and most didn’t want to talk about what they did over there.  This is because they had to find some way to deal with the fact that they had to kill other human beings and had to see many of their buddies die at the hands of other human beings.  On the ground and in the trenches, the inevitable situation soldiers find themselves in during a war is doing whatever it takes to make sure that they and their buddies get home safely.  There is no glory in war, there is only pain. 

So you may be asking, what is the answer to war?  My answer is to hold the leaders accountable for their actions.  Why would it have been so evil to assassinate Hitler (or insert the out-of-control government leader here) but its OK or even a great patriotic good to send millions of men onto battlefields to kill millions of other men?  Really, why does that make sense?  America always wants to point to how morally superior we are because we do not endorse assassination, yet we are always ready to send our soldiers into harms way. 

If you want something to remember this Memorial Day, I would ask that you remember the amount of pain that our war veterans have had to endure because of the actions of the leaders of governments (foreign and our own). 

I don’t know who said it but its true. If you give time to everyone who asks for it, you will have no time left for yourself. There are so many people that only want a minute or five minutes or even if you just have thirty seconds to talk to them that if you give in to their demands for your time that you will never get anything done that you are supposed to. Now, for what is important to you, you need to spend the time to make sure it is done right, but it can be very hard to figure out what needs to be important to you. I like things that are digests of materials that other people have put time into or things that come highly recommended because that means that a lot of other people have already vetted it and I am probably not wasting my time reading or doing it.

The sister of Sharon Tate, one of Charles Manson’s victims, shows up at every one of Manson’s parole hearings.  She does so to remind the parole board of exactly the cost to her family of Manson’s crime in the hope that Manson will never be released. 

Likewise, there are activists that have to show up at every Congressional hearing to show the legislators that his/hers rights are at stake.  If they do not do this the legislators just carry on passing laws that erode personal liberties.  To be sure, very few laws take away many rights at once but taken all together they account for major losses of our rights. 

Why is activism of this kind necessary?  Why do citizens have to defend their very liberty from legislators that vowed to uphold our Constitution and defend our rights?  When did our representatives get the power to play Caesar and pick winners and losers?  What is it going to take to steady this ship of state in a direction towards individual liberty?  I hate that I can only ask these questions.  The answers appear to me to be painful or impossible with our current government.

OK everyone, especially all of you populist liberals out there, Robin Hood stole from the tax collector and gave to the poor.  He did NOT steal from the rich and give to the poor.  A recent version of this is a TV commercial in which a damsel (I use this term very loosely) in distress calls out for some pay-day-loan hero to come and save her.  Save her from what?  Her landlord.  They made him up to look and act very dastardly but he was her landlord trying to collect rent owed to him.  Nothing about him changing the rent in the middle of the lease, and nothing like him breaking in to steal her belongings, he was just trying to collect the rent.  If you sign a contract and you are living in someone else’s building and you refuse to pay the rent, YOU are the villain because you are stealing from your landlord.  Is this really that hard to understand?

Recent National Guard commercials have scenes from the Revolutionary War been re-enacted.  The problem with showing this is that the Revolutionary War was fought by militia groups, not the National Guard.  The National Guard is state sponsored, state trained, and answerable to the state.  Militia groups are none of the above.  Just remember, George Washington didn’t wear a red coat.

Why Union? Take a look.

I was in a government building today and saw a sign posted that raised my ire.  It was a recruiting poster for a government employees union.  The first thing on the poster was the main reason they state for government employees to join their union.  The reason, “The THREAT:  Under way is a powerful and rapidly moving effort aimed at the total dismantling of government as we know it.”  OK, not even the libertarians want to disassemble the government completely.  Now, disassembling government employees unions?  You bet I want to do that!  Unions in the real world (aka, in a free market) have to dance a fine line between getting everything they can for their membership and running the company they negotiate with straight into the ground.  A dead company employs no one and the union employees might have a union but no job.  Government employees don’t have that problem.  Governments cannot be put out of business and while some government employees do lose there jobs from time to time a union of government employees doesn’t have to worry about putting the government out of business with their theft from the taxpayers.  They just raise taxes.  They put it in sugary-sweet terms like for the common good and it’s for the children but the unions couldn’t give a rat’s ass about the common good and your children aren’t paying union dues so they’re out too.  When you have the teachers union putting their hand picked candidates on school boards it would be like a union getting seats on a company’s board of directors.  Oh, but there’s one big difference.  In a regular company the stockholders vote for Board members and pick board members that represent their best interests as stockholders.  A union would have to own a majority of the companies stock to get their pick of Board members.  What does a teachers union have to buy?  The candidate.  That’s it.  Just get them elected and you’re in.  It’s sooooo much cheaper than buying a majority stake in a corporation.  Even Employee Stock Ownership Programs (ESOPs) doesn’t give employees that much power that cheaply.  The real nitty gritty?  Government employees can go to the voters with their grievances.  They don’t need unions and voters shouldn’t allow unions for government employees. 

I am getting back into running.  One thing that has always bothered me about runners is sometimes they are runners and sometimes they are just joggers that call themselves runners.  Joggers can’t seem to stride out past where their knees straighten out.  I know this is nit picking but those people are not runners, they are joggers.  In order to speed up a runner just lengthens their stride, joggers have to speed up their pace because their stride length is fixed.  To me, joggers are the reason that most people are not runners.  Jogging kills your knees with all of the impact.  A good running stride shouldn’t shock your knees much more than a brisk walk.  Humans evolved strictly for the purpose of running.  Not just sprinting, but full-on distance running.  We had to run to track and kill anything in the hilly grasslands of Africa.  Since we cannot out-sprint most African game we had to run it down over miles.  That is our genetic heritage.  Now we are just pencil pushers and couch potatoes.  If you want to be healthy you need to embrace the runner in you.  STOP JOGGING and run like an human.

I hope I’m not just being naïve here, but when are we going to see an election for President where once the final blows are dealt and a winner is declared that the entire nation pulls together behind the winner?  Has that ever been the case?  I seem to remember a founding father saying something like “In America we may be right or wrong but abroad may we be always right”.  To me that says that we can fight like cats and dogs here at home but when we show a face to the world it needs to be one united front.  I agree.  George Washington said that the two party system would be the doom of America.  I agree with that too.  I think the partisan bickering that we see today could not exist without the two party system setting half the country against the other.  To me they are like the corporate bosses and the union bosses always at each others throats.  All they can agree on is to disagree.  It’s as if once they agree on anything that their constituents won’t need them anymore.  My goodness, we can’t have that now, can we?  The politicians need the people to NEED them. 

I think what the people really need is to not need the politicians.  Why can’t the busybodies in Congress leave us alone?  Why can’t they get together for a little while each year, discuss the state of the nation, make crucial adjustments (as laid out in that forgotten document, the Constitution) and then go home to their real lives?  I feel like I’m sitting in a wheelchair being “helped” into traffic by a well-meaning homicidal maniac. 

Now I am not crazy about the idea of Barack Obama being elected President of these United States, but at the same time I am sick of the constant bickering between the Republicans and Democrats.  I would really like to see everyone sit down with the best interests of the American people in mind, get the work done that needs to be done and go home.  Even if what they end up doing is a mistake (which I expect it would be), at least our leaders would have been leaders and done their jobs.  If it ending up being a mistake then we could clearly look back and say it was a mistake and move on and fix it.  This endless bickering does nothing to help our nation.  All it does is extend the blame game for another four years.  Believe me, after Bush the Younger, there is plenty of blame to go around.   Can we stop playing games now?  Can our leaders really step up and be leaders again?