GneissGuy

I am disappointed in America today. The SCOTUS has upheld the freedom of expression that campaign finance reform took away from corporations and unions. Instead of taking a really hard look at what the campaign finance problem is, all I have heard today is the usual bickering over how we limit money in politics. WAKE UP PEOPLE!!! Stop playing the shell game the politicians want you to play! Take a step back away from the con-artists table and look at the game. The REAL reason there is money in politics is because the corporations and unions have correctly identified the problem with campaign finance. The politicians have been given or have taken a massive amount of power and now they get to decide who wins and who loses. The corporations and unions are only fighting for survival. If they don’t pay to play, their opponents (often an opposing corporation or union) will pay the piper and make off with the loot. The only way this country will reduce the corruption of our government is to restore the restrictions that had been originally placed on the federal branch of government in the Constitution and Bill of Rights. Remember, if you don’t play a game by a solid set of rules, expect to lose!

Just remember, if you think health care is expensive, just wait until it’s free!!
Indenpendance Institute\'s Take on the Government\'s Health Care Con, I mean Cure. No, I really mean con. Really.

How much longer do you think this house of cards can last? We have a government that no longer bears any resemblance to the Constitution. We have fiat money that no longer bears any resemblance to real money. We have politicians that no longer bear any resemblance to the citizens they are supposed to represent. This country is now a hard-scrabble of good intentions, bad ideas, and down-right thievery.
There is no other way to explain 95% of government spending today. Let’s take money from the working citizens and give it to the retired. Let’s take money from the healthy and give it to the sick. It’s devolved to the point that the politicians have now said let’s take money from those driving nice cars and give it to those driving clunkers. Sooner or later the bill is going to come due and while the politicians say they are not driving us to socialism they are already quickly running out of other people’s money.
The US managed to have a few wars come to it in its first hundred years, but now we have waged wars on foreign soil for almost one hundred years. Our founding fathers warned us that our freedom at home would be lost to the threat of foreign menaces. Each war we fight outside of this country has eroded our freedom at home. With this last war against “terror” our Bill of Rights is threadbare.
Within the US we has seen the evolution of the police forces from sheriffs with little more than badges to para-military police departments in our major cities that would count as a larger military than 75% of the world’s countries. We have the highest imprisonment level of any nation at any time in the world’s history. Even back to Roman times Tacitus’ words ring down to us that “The more corrupt the state the more numerous the laws.”
So I ask you again, how much longer do you think the US can last until we are reduced to a footnote in the textbooks of history?
I don’t think the old gal has much left in her. Now I just cringe every time a politician runs to the public yelling about how the government needs to “do something!!” Necessity is the creed of dictators and the mantra of slaves. If you count yourself as not amongst the sheeple, you need to take a hard look at the necessities our government is operating on right now. I wished I could tell you the answer is that we just need to tell our politicians to stop it but I can’t. Now I think the best we can do is to prepare for the coming collapse in the best way we each know how and then hang on for dear life. Good luck to us all.

Mahatma Gandhi once said: “There is no way to peace, peace is the way.”
I really have nothing to add to that, I just want you to think about the words.
With those words, please do not reach for you guns when TSHTF. Reach for your videocamera. Don’t cooperate with your captors or your would-be masters. Video their bad behavior and make sure they cannot hide in the shadows or behind their co-conspirators in the judiciary.

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.

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 attended a very interesting meeting last night. The bulk of the group were big “L” Libertarians but there were also a few of that dying breed of small-government-Republicans. I have railed on about how the Republican party has been taken over by God-and-Guns conservatives. After talking with these small-government-Republicans, I really have to wonder what it is that still makes them Republicans? If you limit government to the level it is supposed to be at, all of the God-and-Guns conservatives lose their ability to legislate morality. That in effect kills most of their platform. Without the “compassionate conservative” spending and the ability for the state to tell you what to do with your body (which may be a sin but isn’t a crime) I don’t think Republicans look that differently than Libertarians. Republicans are still talking about strict constitutionalism but other than a few Supreme Court justices I have seen nothing that harkens back to the days of Barry Goldwater. Even Ron Paul has been show the door by a party he refuses to leave. The only thing I can think of is that the small-government Republicans are operating under the Muslim rule of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”. Maybe they should ask the State department how that’s been working for America.

I have been hearing to rumors of a possible McCain/Liberman ticket today. I remember quite some time ago someone saying that if either candidate crossed the aisle and took a member of the other party as a VP they would win the Presidency. Now we are days away from the possibility becoming a reality. Being a Libertarian this move would be nothing more than a novelty to me since my vote will be for Bob Barr in November. But without a dog in this particular fight it will be a lot of fun to watch the squirming that the Republican party will be put through with this. The independents will probably be swayed by this “maverick” move but the party faithful will be forced to hold their collective breath come November when they will dutifully vote for McCain because “party trumps person”. Of course this will not make McCain any less of a DC insider happy to play the politicians shell-game with American citizens, but it may make him President.