GneissGuy

I do not condone what Joe Stack did, but I do understand it.  In the same way that I could not condone the homicidal actions of Klebold and Harris, I did understand them.  Not everyone is a willow tree that can bend with the storm.  Some of us are more likely to break than bend.  You can call Joe Stack a coward, but at least he had the conviction to fly the plane into the building himself.  The people I would call the cowards are the nameless, faceless, countless bureaucrats that sit in their government offices day after day issuing little pieces of paper that destroy people’s lives with no possible damage to themselves.  Well, no damage until someone like Joe Stark breaks and thinks he has nothing left to lose.

My point is, if you truly believe that Joe Stark was a coward and you cannot understand what he did then you are entitled to your opinion.  However, if you are engaging in damage control by denouncing a man that fought back against a government that no longer fears its citizens; you are doing no one a favor.  I say this because you are not going to soften up the statists attitude toward liberty activists by being tough on someone they broke.  The people that count are the people who are mad as hell about our current state of government and while they will not condone Joe Stark’s actions, they also understand them.  Take times like this to direct their anger in the constructive direction you want them to instead of blaming a victim of statist violence for breaking and fighting back with violence.

In Liberty, John West

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.

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). 

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. 

Do you enjoy having Uncle Sam dip his filthy hand into your pocket every paycheck to extract Federal Income Taxes, State Income Taxes, FICA, and Social Security??  What if instead of the Government dipping in for their pound of flesh it was a union boss?  At least the Government has been voted the power to do its dirty deeds.  The union bossed figured out that having the government collect the money for them was a great idea.  After all, the Government collects its money with the inherent threat of someone with a gun showing up to collect it should you get “uppity”.  All Amendment 49 does is remove the Government as a middleman.  The union bosses will get to do their own dirty work.  Real pity there.  NOT!!!! 

I am disgusted by the TV ads that I have seen where the union bosses have the unmitigated gall to state that Amendment 49 takes away workers right to choose.  It’s more accurate to state that Amendment 49 takes away the union bosses right to do whatever they damned well please with workers money.  One thing you really need to remember when you are ready to vote is that the only sector where union membership has increased is with GOVERNMENT workers.  The reason is pretty simple.  Workers have seen the damage that unions do to businesses.  A belligerent union can cripple a company and that company will fail when it attempts to compete in a market while it is handicapped by union action.  Instead of getting better working conditions and better pay that the unions promise, workers get laid off.  This is happening to Detroit autoworkers as we speak.  Many of the companies that have moved overseas have done so to escape aggressive unions that want high school grads to make as much or more than college grads, all in the name of “fairness”.  All of that risk goes away when unions talk to government workers.  You can’t run the government out of business.  Run out of taxpayer money?  Just raise taxes!!!  Wow, problem solved right?  WRONG!!  If I am correct almost every major school district in the metro area has a 3A and 3B measure on their ballots.  With those spending measure and Amendment 59 the teachers unions are trying to mainline tax dollars to feed their habit.  This has to stop!!!

Do not believe the unions.  They are not on your side.  Take away their last bastion of safety and vote yes for Amendment 49!!

Simple.  Repeat after me.  Companies do not pay taxes.

No matter what the politicians tell you companies do not pay taxes.  Yes, the government can force companies to give them money and call it corporate taxation but the companies do not have money that does not first have to come from YOU!!!  So when the politicians tells you “Don’t worry we’ll just get the money from these EVIL corporations”, you now know the truth.  The truth is that the companies are going to increase the price of the products that they sell you to make up for what the “taxes” are and YOU are going to pay the taxes just like you pay all of the other taxes. 

Please do not fall for the bear trap that Bill Ritter put out there all filled with yummy goodies that you are told you won’t have to pay for.  If you do you will find that just like a real bear trap, this Amendment is going to cost you an arm and a leg.  Please vote NO on Amendment 58.

Wow, the union ads attacking Amendment 47 are overflowing!!  They are also complete loads of BS that only appeal to union workers and never state the actual Amendment language.  Here is what Amendment 47 would do: every worker in the State of Colorado will get to decide for themselves whether or not to belong to a union.  Its simple, unions are on the way out and union bosses don’t like it.  Their numbers are dwindling and this is viewed as an attack on the “closed shops” where workers have no say as to whether or not they want to belong to the union. 

The fact is that the only sector where union membership has increase in the last twenty years has been in Government.  The reasoning then follows that this Amendment would shut down “closed shops” in GOVERNMENT agencies.  The anti-47 ads are always wheeling out the “heroes” and saying that 47 would taking away their voices.  Excuse me???  These “heroes” are workers working for the Government and answer to the taxpayers!!!  In my opinion, no Government workers should be allowed to unionize.  If they don’t like their working conditions they can take it to the voters.  Its not at all like the ads make it out, that only evil corporate bosses are looking to squash the poor blue collar workers that have had to fight for every benefit and dollar they get.  These “heroes” are working for YOU, the taxpayer.  If you live in the state of Colorado and care about workers REAL rights, please vote YES for Amendment 47.