Where’s the Panic?

One surprising feature of all of this economic uncertainty is how little Americans are panicking over it. Yes, it’s sudden, tragic, and I don’t know anyone who hasn’t lost thousands of dollars in the past few weeks. Yet we remain optimistic, up-beat, and hard-working.

Why is that?

I believe it is because that is how we, as Americans, live our lives. There are going to be storms and tragedies. Bad stuff happens. But we don’t have to wait for government to act to make our own lives better. We rely, primarily, on ourselves as individuals and if we find ourselves lacking, we turn to our families, churches, and communities for the needed strength.

In the end, I doubt the bailout will do anything but cause more confusion. I doubt that the banks will be able to do what they did before and still make money. I doubt that the financial sector will look anything like what it did years ago. But I don’t doubt that Americans will be there ready to meet tomorrow’s challenges today, with or without the government.

Obama Won’t Refute Socialism Charges

Notice how Biden and Obama run away from the charges that they are socialists? I wonder why that is? After all, isn’t it a grand and noble concept to take from the rich and give to the poor?

If there’s any doubt in your mind that Karl Marx, Josef Stalin, and Barack Obama all feel the same about wealth, then you’ll have to read LGF to clear it all up. (link)

By the way, I question the patriotism of Obama and all socialists. You can’t love the American ideal of individual liberty and the rule of law and be a socialist.

Balls and Urns, or Why Polls Don’t Work All the Time

Iowahawk does an awesome job explaining why the margin of error you see for political polls is worthless. (link)

Short answer: If you haven’t voted already, you should vote right now, since the only poll that counts is the one on November 4.

Welcome To Washington State Politics

Here in Washington State, opposing the One True Party is a criminal offense. Watch as Dino Rossi is forced to take 4 hours out of his busy campaign days before the election to answer trumped up and baseless charges. Watch as lawyers do anything to hurt his image in front of the camera. Watch as judges sit idly by and encourage it all along.

The way socialists work, since socialism is never as popular as it seems it is in the press, is that socialists do anything they can to suppress their opponents or the voters. They do so in a number of ways. Here in Washington State, we are seeing them all.

One way is to refuse to count the ballots of those who probably voted for the other guy. We see in the 2004 elections that this was the modus operandi, or at least step one of the MO.

Another way is to stuff the ballot boxes. The trick to stuffing the ballot boxes is to do so in such an open and brazen way that sane people wonder if it really happened at all. After all, if I came running and screaming out of an election center claiming that democrats were literally stuffing the ballot box, you’d probably think I was crazy, right? So that’s why they don’t even have to hide as they “discover” lost ballots and count ballots that should never be counted.

Of course, when you don’t have full control over the ballot box as the socialists do in King County, the socialists rely on other tried and true tactics of voter suppression. First, they make you feel uncomfortable since you believe in basic human dignity and freedom. They call you “racist” and worse since you refuse to believe that taking something from someone and simply giving it to another is fair and just and moral.

If this belittling doesn’t work on you, it will likely work on those around you. The socialists build up social groups where the only accepted thought processes are their thought processes. To think a different thought, to challenge any of their premises, to simply have an open mind (which they seem to advocate) is to face ostracization. Using the group and mob mentality, they can effectively keep wise and moral people suppressed from speaking.

Another tactic they use is violence against property and person. We’ve witnessed this as Obama supporters maced McCain supporters in their campaign headquarters. We’ve seen the bullet holes on the McCain campaign busses. But the McCain campaign is hardly the only target. People who exercise their right to free speech have had their political signs bashed into their heads, have been threatened verbally and physically, and have suffered worse at the hands of socialists.

But if this is still not enough to suppress the vote, socialists will use whatever legal authority they can invent to abuse you. Witness what they are doing to Dino Rossi as we speak. Despite the lack of evidence that Dino Rossi and the BIAW were coordinating their independent campaigns, Dino Rossi will still have to face trial. And despite the fact that liberal organizations and liberal campaigns are obviously coordinating, those charges will never be heard. Witness, in fact, the LA Times withholding valuable information about Obama’s past association with Palestinian Terrorists at a Jew-hate festival. Witness the liberal media simply parroting Obama campaign lines. Witness government officials abusing their office to investigate unlawfully Joe the Plumber.

There is no limit to the methods that socialists will use to impose socialism. As Obama said, his regret from the Warren Court was that they didn’t rip the entire Constitution to shreds, but only a significant fraction of it, because they still respected property rights. They are using judges to impose socialism, bit by bit, and they are no longer quiet about it.

Hugo Chavez, a well-known and outspoken socialist, is perhaps a good modern-day example for what socialists do. Because he lives in a distant country, and because we can get most of the real news from that country unfiltered by our own socialists’s agenda, we can see how he is using whatever means necessary to bring the people of Venezuela under the heel of his despotic government. Why, just recently, he threatened his political opponent, calling him a pig and threatening to throw him in jail. Does that sound familiar? Of course, calling someone a pig in the US is hardly insulting. Calling them racist is far more comparable.

Socialists have no respect for the rule of law or the sacred traditions and liberties we preserve. They either do not understand why we cherish our right to speak our mind, to bear arms and shoot them at the bad guys, and cast our vote. If they do understand why we cherish these things, they are working hard to remove those traditions from our society so that they can impose their own utopic vision of hard-working people crushed under the heel of corruption and oppression in the name of “Justice”.

As an American, I swear an oath that I would see to it that socialism and everything like it is destroyed. We all do as we pledge allegiance to the flag, or really, the institution behind that flag, and institution that declares all men equal, endowed by their Creator with inalienable rights, among them life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. I will not rest until every person who believes that righteousness can only come in the oppression of a class of people is convinced otherwise. I will not rest until every tongue that wags against our divine heritage of sacred liberty is stilled.

Obama is not new, although he does represent a type of “change” and “hope”. His change is a change from the American order, the order that has, despite all challenges, made more men free than any order in the history of the world, and has created more wealth than any order ever could. This order can assemble vast armies of unimaginable strength, bring them down to bear with crippling efficiency against our enemies, and yet leave the battlefield a happier place than when we found it.

And the “hope” of Obama? He simply hopes that the American people will be stupid enough to put him in a position of power, where perhaps he and others like him can once again institute the order of Kings, where people who believe they are appointed by God extract wealth from the lowly serfs and use it to hold extravagant parties. And when those rules stoop down to offer a penny to the poor, they do so as if they themselves created that penny and they themselves fed them with their own bread, when in truth, they are merely sharing a fraction of their spoils.

The more I get to know Obama the more I realize he isn’t much different from Marx, Lenin, Stalin, Pol Pot, Kim Il Seong, Castro, Chavez, and all the others. They believe that they can, somehow, do good in the world by doing a little evil first. They think that somehow those who create wealth are the destroyers of wealth, and that those who destroy it are its creators. While they may have noble intentions, or at least express noble intentions, their ends are all the same. Let me remind my readers of what those ends are. More dead than any wars ever fought over religion. More enslaved than any country could by force or trade. More demoralized than any general could ever hope to bring. More despair, more grief, more sadness, more, more, and more of what this world is only so willing to offer.

There is “hope” and “change”, real hope and change, but it is not in any man of this world. Not too long ago, a man who was conceived by a woman and a God descended to the earth, led a perfect life, exhorting all men to follow him and be perfect like him and his father. Then, in an ultimate act of mercy, he stooped lower still to break the bonds of death and hell that had enslaved all mankind. Today, he offers hope and change to any who will accept his name, turn their lives toward him and him alone, and simply practice the gospel he preached. And unlike all the false hopes and false changes that all the would-be gods and emperors and kings and lords of men, this message was real, and authentic, and powerful.

The hope and change he spread led directly to the American continent, where firm believers in his gospel decided to do away with the way of the earth and embrace equality and true justice and service as the ideals of government. These men, for the first time, put government beneath God, even beneath man. They elevated the poorest men, the most disabled and untalented, the lowest of all men above the highest of government offices. They put the power to create and destroy that government squarely in the hands of the people, with a charge to keep government within the bounds it was set in.

And that hope and change from the usual order led to what we have today. Today we are the richest country, both in material wealth and in spiritual wealth. We are happier, more productive, kinder and more charitable than any other race of men on the planet. We give more, we make more, we build more, we fix more, we do more than any other people.

We are what we are not because we have superior blood or heritage or our land is somehow better than any other land in the world. No, these things we freely admit are not the secrets to our success. Our secret is what we think and believe.

We believe that God created all man in his own image.

We believe that below man God put all other things in this world, and above the world God set man.

We believe that God instituted government to serve man, not man to serve government.

We believe that God gave each man individual rights and responsibilities, and that governments exist only because each man permits it to exist, and governments exist only for as long as each man permits it to.

We believe that freedom, not bondage, is the proper order of things. No scientist can ever describe the complexities of our human interactions any more than an astronomer could map the stars in the sky. And as such, no scientist or single man or group of men could ever hope to govern other men. It is the right way for each man to rely on himself and God to navigate this world and to secure for themselves their economic living and spiritual welfare.

We believe that government should be kept small lest it thinks itself superior. And we believe we have long ago permitted government to grow too far, and we have hardly been successful at making it any smaller.

We believe that those who believe that government has an answer that the people do not have believe that government confers mystical rights and powers, no different than the kings who believe they are ordained of God to rule over men and have a right by their kingship to abuse them. And we believe that the ultimate ends of forms of government that are based on such absurd ideas is misery.

At least, that’s what we used to believe in Washington State. Read our constitution, it’s all in there, in rather clear language.

And that’s why I reject the Democratic Party in our state and all those who align with it.

Why the Widening Poverty Gap is a Good Thing for the Poor

I am going to argue what appears to be inarguable. It is actually good that the rich in the US are far more wealthy than the poor, at least compared to other countries.

As evidence, let’s consider two countries. In county A, the top 1% of the country make bazillions of dollars every day. They make more money going to the bathroom than entire countries can make in a hundred years. These are people that are so successful and so wealthy and so powerful, that if it doesn’t involve millions of dollars they can’t be bothered to even consider it. The poorest 1% in this country are making a pittance compared to these rich guys. They are making a millionth of what they make in a year. That is, for every million dollars the rich guys make, they make only one. Pretty unfair, right? Of course, when you do the math, it’s not terribly bad. They’re stilling making a few thousand dollars, if not tens of thousand a year. Sure, they got food and clothing, and perhaps even own an old car or a nice TV set. But they are BILLIONS of dollars poor-er than the richest 1%.

In country B, however, things are much different. The richest 1% of the country don’t make billions. They don’t even own billions in assets, even though they practically own their entire country. They are only able to make a few tens of millions, and only then if they are extremely lucky. Conditions in their country make being rich hard. It’s hard because there aren’t a lot of other rich people to work with. It’s hard because there isn’t a huge educated workforce to work in the factories they build. And it’s hard because they have to work so hard just to keep their money out of the hands of robbers and thieves, or worse, the government. The poorest in this country, unlike country A, make merely 1/100,000 of what the rich make. For every $100,000 the richest make, they make only $1. The poor aren’t really doing that bad compared to the rich, since they are only making millions less, not billions.

Which country would you rather be poor in?

If you answered B, you just might be voting for Barack Obama this year. If you answered A, then you probably tried to get Mitt Romney nominated, and failing that, see the need to stop Barack Obama from becoming president.

Of course the poor have far less than the rich in our country. In a land of opportunity, the rich are going to be vastly richer than anywhere else in the world. But you don’t understand how the rich get rich if you think this is a bad thing.

The communist, zero-sum thinking which has been disproven clearly by practical and clear experience, is that there is only so much money to go around. The communist, people like Bill Ayers and Barack Obama, think that the rich get rich by taking money from the poor. Almost like how a mugger gets rich, or a highway robber, they believe that the rich are rich because they are just better robbers than the other guy.

This is, of course, terribly wrong. That’s not at all how rich people get rich. People who get rich know that you don’t get rich by taking things, you get rich by making things. You take something and make it more valuable. You put resources to their best uses. You treat all of your assets, including your time, energy, money, and thought, to those things that are the most profitable. You freely exploit those around you, and they allow you to do so since they are exploiting you. We call that free trade, and even free markets. You know it because you gladly hand over money you’ve earned to get food and clothing, while the stores happily give away food and clothing in exchange for that money. Both of you run away thinking you just tricked the other guy into giving you a better deal. More likely, you both realize that you need each other to survive, and that when one gets better so does the other.

Well, that is how the rich see the world. They see opportunity in others around them. They see potential for making deals. The secret is making deals that not only make you better off, but help the other guy. That is, if I sign a contract with you that makes both of us a bazillion dollars, then there’s a really good chance we’ll both keep it. But if I’m making a bazillion dollars and you’re making nothing, then you probably won’t want to keep your end of the deal and I’ll probably be more than willing to “spread the wealth around” to make myself more money.

In the end, wealth isn’t something that you can “take” and “give”. It is only, in reality, “created” or “destroyed”. Free market interchanges, where people are able to understand what it is they are buying and selling, where they can buy and sell on their own terms at their leisure, where there are plenty of buyers and sellers, quite literally create wealth out of thin air. But things that interfere with these free interactions, laws and regulations that make people do the wrong thing, liars and cheats such as those who continued the mortgage scam, and taxes, quite literally destroy wealth, at the very least wealth that could’ve been created but more likely wealth that already did exist.

Communism is a terrible evil since if devalues humankind into being nothing more than a commodity to be bought and sold by the state. But it is also evil since it takes every opportunity to destroy wealth, It’s almost as if Karl Marx tried his best to think of a way to destroy society and everything that makes life worth living, and did his best to distill that into a few basic principles that even community organizers buying fraudulent voter registrations could understand.

When I see headlines like “Poverty Gap Widest in US”, or headlines that try to show that capitalism is unfair because the rich are, goshdarnit, so dang rich, I can only imagine that the authors are trying to inspire hatred of the fairest and most productive system yet discovered to try and convince the masses that going with the broken, disproven and wholly evil system is somehow a better idea. But I’m also surprised that people care so much about how much money their neighbor is making. Honestly, I don’t care that Bill Gates doesn’t even have time to bend down to pick up a hundred dollar bill. I don’t care that Warren Buffet makes more money than I’ll ever make in my lifetime in the time it takes him to take a shower. That doesn’t make my life any better or worse on its own.

I do care, however, when people propose destroying the Bill Gates and the Warren Buffetts of the world to make someone else’s life better. It just doesn’t work that way. If anything, I figure that Bill Gates is at least as important to my life as the bum who digs through the garbage cans at night. Perhaps he’s doing even more to feed my family and clothe my kids than that bum. So whatever disrespect he deserves for his wealth, he deserves no more than that bum does for his wealth.

A Taste

Joe Biden, you just got a taste of what it feels like to be a republican. (link)

And by the way, you did a terrible, terrible job.

And by the way, after the interview, if you declare you’ll never interview with that news show again, you’re only admitting that you can’t take the heat.

Oh, and by the way, when Sarah Palin faces tough questions like this and blows the interviewers out of the water, they have to twist her comments and lie about the facts to make her look bad. You just look bad on your own.

If there were more reporters like this, I might actually watch the TV news shows again.

McCain-Obama in a Dead Heat: McCain Wins

I’m looking at the latest AP polls and it shows that McCain and Obama are deadlocked.

Of course, mid-October in the past meant democrats are ahead and republicans are behind. Even with all the “good news” for Obama (which is the “bad news” for Americans), and even though he’s supposed to be the Second Coming of Christ according to some, he can’t seem to get ahead of an old worn-out politician who has seen better days, and a supposedly ditzy inexperienced small-town mayor.

So this means McCain is going to sweep the country like nothing else. Just like Reagan, Bush, and Bush have.

Get out there and vote, and maybe Washington State will be red this year.

Barack Obama, and All of the Democrats, are Socialists

Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Christine Gregoire, even my local representative Adam Smith (despite the name) are socialists. They would take away your freedom and empower government bureaucrats.

Apparently I’m a racist for saying that.

So be it. I’d rather be a racist America-loving capitalist than a commie any day of the week.

If you want government to be the focus of your life, then vote D all the way down.

If you’d rather have better things to do than worry about whether government will be taking three-quarters or just half of your paycheck, then you’ll have to vote R (or GOP) all the way down.

Harrassing the Mormons is A-OK!

Article VI Blog has discovered harassment of members of the LDS church in California in the fight over Proposition 8, a California State constitutional amendment to ban homosexual marriage. (link)

Those of you out there who think it’s fun to pick on people because of what they believe will be surprised to find out that it doesn’t work. We’ve been down that road before, remember? It was called the Spanish Inquisition. If you want to go back to those bad old times and declare open season on the Mormons, and you’re itching to pull out your tar and feathers, then you would do best to re-read your history books. If you’ve read past Buchanan’s Blunder, you’ve gone too far.

There is a way to disagree with someone’s beliefs and voice that disagreement without being disagreeable. Unfortunately, the entire left side of the spectrum has seemed to have lost that sacred art. In their bid to bring communism to the forefront of our political lives, to make government and not God the center of our lives, they stoop so low as to beat women with their McCain signs on the streets of New York. (link) I don’t have to describe what they have done to the fine governor of one of our states, the most popular governor anywhere because she happens to be a woman who supports life.

I understand that the vast majority of this country wants nothing to do with the vitriol and hatred that is spewing like raw sewage from the mouths of certain TV personalities and political activists on the left. No, there is no similar spewing from the right, despite the leftist hater’s best attempts to project. As a country, we are turning it off, closing the newspapers, and leaving the magazines on the newsstands that spew this hate.

George Soros is a powerful man, so powerful that he can throw money around to whatever leftist causes he likes. But no amount of money can buy an American’s vote. Rather, it is the other way around. When you’ve earned American votes, you tend to get all the campaign cash you need and then some.

I’m hoping and praying for a speedy downfall of the vitriolic left. I hope it will be bloodless, perhaps even bruiseless. Nonetheless, one day we will wake up and find these people so completely marginalized that we pay more attention to the lions in the zoo.

The Utility of Nuclear Power

Imagine a power source that takes, as input, dirt. Its waste is a solid form of dirt, something that can be sealed in barrels and buried deep underground. But even the waste form of this power is extraordinarily useful, and with advances in technology, we may find ways to extract useful energy from it as well. Nevertheless, the amount of waste dirt generated from a power plant that powers several cities is pitifully small.

This power source emits no other kind of waste. There is no carbon dioxide. There is, unfortunately, some warm air and steam that is expelled since the power source heats water from a local river and powers steam turbines with it. But this warm air and steam will eventually return back to the earth as rain. Not acid rain, but just regular old rain, the kind of stuff that’s supposed to fall form the sky from time to time.

This power source is safe. It’s not only safe to humans, it’s safe to the fishes and birds and bugs.

This power source has been perfected in the past 50 years. Sure, there were accidents. The worst accident occurred in the USSR, where they build their power sources in the worst way possible. We could’ve told them about all the smart things we do to make sure that not even the worst possibilities cause any damage. But we didn’t because we were at war and the last thing we needed was our enemy producing lots of lots of clean, safe energy.

In the civilized world, we’ve been using this power for an extremely long time safely. There was a small accident, but that accident resulting in no damage of any kind. That is, everything was contained as designed and no one even got hurt. There were a group of Japanese who were trying to make their manufacturing of the fuel source more efficient by making more and more at the same time. A few people died, a lot more got very sick, but there was no damage to the environment since the entire facility was designed to contain just such an event.

In fact, the number of exposures and accidents we’ve had in the world is so low that we still don’t really know how much of this stuff will kill a person. We think it is a certain level, but really, we’re guessing. If a person ever gets exposed to a fraction of this level, we play it safe and keep them away from it for the rest of their lives.

The energy source I am talking about, of course, is nuclear energy. It is everything you could ever imagine in a power source. Its fuel is cheap and plentiful, and no country has a monopoly on it. It is safe, easy to use, and controllable. The only requirements is that facilities be built near plenty of running water which is used to power the turbines. Contrary to popular belief, there is no leakage of radiation, none, and it is perfectly safe for children and fish and insects to live and play in the water downstream.

As a country, we’ve been sitting on our hands getting our act together to find a place to bury the nuclear waste. Of course, we want to bury it in a certain way so that it doesn’t get out into the environment, but also in a way that we can retrieve it if we find uses for it. But it’s been too long to form a consensus, and despite the best efforts of engineers and scientists, the American people are still uncomfortable with it. But that hasn’t stopped the production of it, since each facility has room and to spare to store the waste on site because there is so little of it.

If we are going to build a green economy, at the heart will be nuclear power plants everywhere in the US. Since there is absolutely no waste that gets into the environment, it will be safer than wind power and safer than hydro power. I cannot imagine an even safer and cleaner method of power generation.