I took a creative writing class my senior year in high school. Mrs. Meleski, bless her, was a great teacher! In that class, I formed a couple of friendships that endure to this day. I also developed a taste for the Japanese poetry form known as haiku. There's about a jillion variations, but the one I learned first was a triplet that had five syllables in the first line, seven in the second, and five in the third. The haiku is a perfect form for the person how has observations on things, but not a lot of time - or in my case, talent - to write a lot. Because of the discipline required, haiku can be very evocative and profound. Like a Japanese sand garden, they are austere and direct.
This morning, on the way to work, I saw a bit of nature that inspired a haiku, and got thinking that maybe I'd set myself a challenge. I'm going to try to write a haiku a day for a year. Don't know if I'll make it, but I'm going to give it a shot. I've never challenged my creativity this way.
And yes, I've watched, "Julie and Julia" twice, and enjoyed it, so that probably has a good deal to do with this impulse.
So here we go.
***************************************************
Well, I almost made it. I got to the 5th of March. It was fun, and not too stressful, but in the end, the stuff that was stressful just buried this project. I'll probably still add to it occasionally. In fact, I composed a haiku this morning, while I was working outside at my property in the South Valley of Albuquerque.
Monday, February 8, 2010
Sunday, February 7, 2010
WEALTH AND SLAVERY
THE SOURCE OF WEALTH
The statists will be stunned to hear this, but they and the government are not the source of wealth, and they sure as hell aren’t the source of anybody’s “fair share.”
The advertisements for the census are driving me nuts – though, to be sure, it’s a very short drive! One of the two that get me the most has been on TV, and shows various American Indians. The theme is that if they don’t participate in the census, they can’t be part of the “community,” and won’t get all they’ve got coming to them. This ad is obscene on several levels. First, it assumes that all American Indians are welfare parasites. Second, it assumes that they will all be moved by a call from “the tribe” – no racism there, eh? Third, it claims that, by filling out a few lines on a form, their membership in the tribe gives them a right to some of my property – their fair share of my property, to be precise.
The other ad has been on the radio. It begins by supposing that if we had 100 children, we’d need 5 teachers. Next year, however, we might have a lot more children, and we’d still only have 5 teachers, and if we don’t fill out the census, how will the government know what is our fair share of someone else’s property? This ad makes assumptions quite similar to the first, with one addition. It also presupposes that education and infrastructure thereunto pertaining can only come from the government.
A very, very interesting common denominator in the two ads is the us-against-them undertone. The “us” is the identified group: American Indians in the first, and some unspecified community in the second. The “them” is other parasites who are apparently competing for shares of the spoils. It is my experience that all statists appeal to a desire they presume to be in all of us to control our neighbors. It’s never, “We will stick a gun in YOUR ribs to get money to give to THEM.” It’s always and ever, “We will stick a gun in THEIR ribs to get money to give YOU.” People who live in planned communities with very strict and oppressive covenants never think about those covenants keeping THEM from doing something. They are always thinking of how the covenants will allow them to stick it to their neighbors. They have a very one-way view of the law, and obviously have never considered this axiom:
RIGHTS THAT ARE NOT UNIVERSALLY PROTECTED
ARE UNIVERSALLY THREATENED.
Individual people can work to earn money, save that money, and invest it. By so doing, they can help in the creation of wealth. A cash investment, added to the genius and hard work of an entrepreneur in a free economy can generate considerably more cash than the original investment.
Government produces only one thing, and it isn’t wealth. The theory of the statists is that cash in the hands of the government is invested far more wisely and justly than that same wealth in the hands of those who created and earned it. This theory also holds that the individual will be motivated by self-interest, or a desire to live better, whereas the government will be motivated solely by altruism and a desire to rescue the downtrodden from the greedy brutes who might otherwise expect them to actually work for their sustenance! This ignores entirely an inconvenient truth (sorry, Al!): (A) that governments are comprised of individual humans, each with his own desire to live better, and, (B) that people applying for their fair share of the property of others are likewise motivated, and might, just maybe, in the odd instance here and there, lie through their damned teeth in order to get more stuff!
Let me ask you this: what is your fair share of something that was taken, under threat of armed force, from your neighbor? Does it seem odd to juxtapose such concepts as “fair” and “theft” in the same sentence? This is an obscenity so despicable as to be a fitting companion to the Islamic custom of stoning to death little girls who have been raped. I am criticized for dealing in hyperbole. Bull poop. Show me a definition of slavery that does not include some variation on being forced – ie, by force of arms – without being duly compensated for you labor. Show me that, and I’ll show you Barack Obama’s dictionary!
Heresy, I hear the cry! Does not the poor, downtrodden working stiff labor without compensation?
No. He doesn’t. If he wants to make more, he can ask for a raise, or he can find another job. School might be an option, and America is filled with schools for adults that are supported most liberally by charity, or by bond issues agreed upon by those who will pay for them.
Next comes, “Why, you hypocrite!” Well, let’s see. I’m a 61-year old white guy with no degree. That puts me in the snowball’s chance in hell division. It frustrates me no end, but the worst of it is that I – I – me – myself, alone – made the decision in 1985 to drop out of college and devote my time to a job that promised short-term compensation with zero future. Can’t blame nobody else for that one.
No government can give something to one person without first having taken it from another. Period. It is prerequisite that, before we can have recipients, we must have donors. Free people support charities, and if you doubt that, look at the astonishing tsunami of wealth we have sent to Haiti. That most of it will end up in the hands of the UN, or of dictators who are to blame for the wretchedness of the nation, in the first place is beside the point. People are generous, and Americans are especially so. Why? Because we have it to share. And why do we have it to share? Because, until recently, we’ve been free, and, even with the constant, growing cancer of government over the past 40 years, we’re still more free and more wealthy than any nation on earth.
Wealth does not pop into existence by spontaneous generation. It is created by thinking, working, humans. The difference between a pile of rock and a magnificent steel bridge is human action. (Thank you, Ludwig.) Statists don’t understand that. They think they can just order the rock around and the bridge will happen. It’s precisely the same delusion by which they think they can order producers to magically generate enough wealth to feed the infinite gluttony of parasitical government employees and welfare pillagers.
The only thing government produces is armed force, and it is by use of this product that it takes property from those who earned it and gives it to those who did not. The difference between charity, which is a commandment of Our Father in Heaven, and welfare is armed force. Charity is voluntary; taxation is slavery. Here’s another little tidbit: the statists just love the Black racists who demand reparation for the suffering of their ancestors under slavery. They also just love to enslave modern Blacks – along with everyone else – under the yoke of statist dictatorship.
Like a ferret in a henhouse, government requires constant restraint in the presence of the liberty of its citizens.
The statists always invoke “the children,” with this little piteous tremble of their chins. Before the industrial revolution, children died by the millions. After the industrial revolution, the mortality rate is less than by orders of magnitude what it was. And do you know why where was child labor during the industrial revolution? Because there were children! Yep. Children were living longer, and instead of burying them in their infancy, folks had to feed and clothe the little buggers, and because the “revolution” occurred pretty suddenly, it took a while for things like wages – which were a bloody radical idea – to catch up. Without freedom, the industrial revolution could never have happened.
So the statists want to destroy the freedom that was and is instrumental in keeping so many children alive long enough to be a burden on their parents. Where is infant mortality highest? In the free countries or the dictatorships? I’ll give you a minute to think that through. Time’s up. Dictatorships kill vastly more people of all ages than do free countries. You can look it up in Snopes.
It was liberty that gave us the wealth to create the lifestyle that allows our children to live to maturity. It was liberty that gave us the medicine the statists wish to destroy. It was statism that created the idiotic laws and protections that allowed the banking and finance industry to squander trillions in building a house of paper and kerosene. How can anyone be stupid enough to believe that destroying freedom and establishing tyranny is good for the children?
They don’t believe that. They bloody well know the consequence of their actions. They are motivated by a seething, septic hatred of humanity. Don’t ever think otherwise.
The statists will be stunned to hear this, but they and the government are not the source of wealth, and they sure as hell aren’t the source of anybody’s “fair share.”
The advertisements for the census are driving me nuts – though, to be sure, it’s a very short drive! One of the two that get me the most has been on TV, and shows various American Indians. The theme is that if they don’t participate in the census, they can’t be part of the “community,” and won’t get all they’ve got coming to them. This ad is obscene on several levels. First, it assumes that all American Indians are welfare parasites. Second, it assumes that they will all be moved by a call from “the tribe” – no racism there, eh? Third, it claims that, by filling out a few lines on a form, their membership in the tribe gives them a right to some of my property – their fair share of my property, to be precise.
The other ad has been on the radio. It begins by supposing that if we had 100 children, we’d need 5 teachers. Next year, however, we might have a lot more children, and we’d still only have 5 teachers, and if we don’t fill out the census, how will the government know what is our fair share of someone else’s property? This ad makes assumptions quite similar to the first, with one addition. It also presupposes that education and infrastructure thereunto pertaining can only come from the government.
A very, very interesting common denominator in the two ads is the us-against-them undertone. The “us” is the identified group: American Indians in the first, and some unspecified community in the second. The “them” is other parasites who are apparently competing for shares of the spoils. It is my experience that all statists appeal to a desire they presume to be in all of us to control our neighbors. It’s never, “We will stick a gun in YOUR ribs to get money to give to THEM.” It’s always and ever, “We will stick a gun in THEIR ribs to get money to give YOU.” People who live in planned communities with very strict and oppressive covenants never think about those covenants keeping THEM from doing something. They are always thinking of how the covenants will allow them to stick it to their neighbors. They have a very one-way view of the law, and obviously have never considered this axiom:
RIGHTS THAT ARE NOT UNIVERSALLY PROTECTED
ARE UNIVERSALLY THREATENED.
Individual people can work to earn money, save that money, and invest it. By so doing, they can help in the creation of wealth. A cash investment, added to the genius and hard work of an entrepreneur in a free economy can generate considerably more cash than the original investment.
Government produces only one thing, and it isn’t wealth. The theory of the statists is that cash in the hands of the government is invested far more wisely and justly than that same wealth in the hands of those who created and earned it. This theory also holds that the individual will be motivated by self-interest, or a desire to live better, whereas the government will be motivated solely by altruism and a desire to rescue the downtrodden from the greedy brutes who might otherwise expect them to actually work for their sustenance! This ignores entirely an inconvenient truth (sorry, Al!): (A) that governments are comprised of individual humans, each with his own desire to live better, and, (B) that people applying for their fair share of the property of others are likewise motivated, and might, just maybe, in the odd instance here and there, lie through their damned teeth in order to get more stuff!
Let me ask you this: what is your fair share of something that was taken, under threat of armed force, from your neighbor? Does it seem odd to juxtapose such concepts as “fair” and “theft” in the same sentence? This is an obscenity so despicable as to be a fitting companion to the Islamic custom of stoning to death little girls who have been raped. I am criticized for dealing in hyperbole. Bull poop. Show me a definition of slavery that does not include some variation on being forced – ie, by force of arms – without being duly compensated for you labor. Show me that, and I’ll show you Barack Obama’s dictionary!
Heresy, I hear the cry! Does not the poor, downtrodden working stiff labor without compensation?
No. He doesn’t. If he wants to make more, he can ask for a raise, or he can find another job. School might be an option, and America is filled with schools for adults that are supported most liberally by charity, or by bond issues agreed upon by those who will pay for them.
Next comes, “Why, you hypocrite!” Well, let’s see. I’m a 61-year old white guy with no degree. That puts me in the snowball’s chance in hell division. It frustrates me no end, but the worst of it is that I – I – me – myself, alone – made the decision in 1985 to drop out of college and devote my time to a job that promised short-term compensation with zero future. Can’t blame nobody else for that one.
No government can give something to one person without first having taken it from another. Period. It is prerequisite that, before we can have recipients, we must have donors. Free people support charities, and if you doubt that, look at the astonishing tsunami of wealth we have sent to Haiti. That most of it will end up in the hands of the UN, or of dictators who are to blame for the wretchedness of the nation, in the first place is beside the point. People are generous, and Americans are especially so. Why? Because we have it to share. And why do we have it to share? Because, until recently, we’ve been free, and, even with the constant, growing cancer of government over the past 40 years, we’re still more free and more wealthy than any nation on earth.
Wealth does not pop into existence by spontaneous generation. It is created by thinking, working, humans. The difference between a pile of rock and a magnificent steel bridge is human action. (Thank you, Ludwig.) Statists don’t understand that. They think they can just order the rock around and the bridge will happen. It’s precisely the same delusion by which they think they can order producers to magically generate enough wealth to feed the infinite gluttony of parasitical government employees and welfare pillagers.
The only thing government produces is armed force, and it is by use of this product that it takes property from those who earned it and gives it to those who did not. The difference between charity, which is a commandment of Our Father in Heaven, and welfare is armed force. Charity is voluntary; taxation is slavery. Here’s another little tidbit: the statists just love the Black racists who demand reparation for the suffering of their ancestors under slavery. They also just love to enslave modern Blacks – along with everyone else – under the yoke of statist dictatorship.
Like a ferret in a henhouse, government requires constant restraint in the presence of the liberty of its citizens.
The statists always invoke “the children,” with this little piteous tremble of their chins. Before the industrial revolution, children died by the millions. After the industrial revolution, the mortality rate is less than by orders of magnitude what it was. And do you know why where was child labor during the industrial revolution? Because there were children! Yep. Children were living longer, and instead of burying them in their infancy, folks had to feed and clothe the little buggers, and because the “revolution” occurred pretty suddenly, it took a while for things like wages – which were a bloody radical idea – to catch up. Without freedom, the industrial revolution could never have happened.
So the statists want to destroy the freedom that was and is instrumental in keeping so many children alive long enough to be a burden on their parents. Where is infant mortality highest? In the free countries or the dictatorships? I’ll give you a minute to think that through. Time’s up. Dictatorships kill vastly more people of all ages than do free countries. You can look it up in Snopes.
It was liberty that gave us the wealth to create the lifestyle that allows our children to live to maturity. It was liberty that gave us the medicine the statists wish to destroy. It was statism that created the idiotic laws and protections that allowed the banking and finance industry to squander trillions in building a house of paper and kerosene. How can anyone be stupid enough to believe that destroying freedom and establishing tyranny is good for the children?
They don’t believe that. They bloody well know the consequence of their actions. They are motivated by a seething, septic hatred of humanity. Don’t ever think otherwise.
Thursday, February 4, 2010
values
4 Feb., 2010
VALUES
Like just about any other aspect of philosophy, the subject of values has taken a real whipping. Well, I’d like to take this opportunity to set the world straight on values. Much of what I’m about to say must be attributed to Ayn Rand, though hearing herself praised by a Mormon probably has her making about 1800 RPM in her grave.
Let’s take an unusual tack here, and start with a definition of “values.” A good definition will take most of the guesswork out of the rest of the subject. Value can be a verb or a noun. For right now, I’m talking about the noun, as in, “a value.” A value is anything a person takes action to gain or to keep. That’s it. Now there are a million other definitions, but I’ve never heard one that cut to the heart of the matter, and was instantly recognizable as fundamental. This definition, however, demands more discussion than can be put on a bumper sticker.
A lot of folks will try to tell you that X is a value, but Y is not. Baloney. It depends on the person doing the valuing! That’s the first real shocker here: without rational beings thinking and acting on their own volition, there are no values, because there’s no one to value anything. Without people desiring money, it could not be a value. Without people to desire life, it could not be a value. So, first of all, we are not talking about something that exists as an isolated concrete.
Anything can be a value. Socialists always sneer at money, because, knowing nothing about money, they think it is the only thing of value. I couldn’t tell you how many times I’ve said something about, “my values,” and been attacked for saying money is the most important thing in the world. They honestly believe that “value,” like “Yankee,” is half a word; they think the whole thing is “monetaryvalue.” Anyone who admits to valuing money in the presence of a socialist had better either have his foot in the stirrup or his holster unsnapped.
I’ve also had people say, “I’m not religious, so values aren’t important to me,” or, “I don’t have a family, so I don’t have any values.” How tragic that the Left has been so successful in perverting and twisting such a crucial subject.
A person can be a value. A ball, a book, a model airplane, freedom, a friend, a dog, a house, a car, money, righteousness, family, relationships…. All of these are things that person might act to gain or to keep, so all can be values. Note, I did not say, “…all ARE values!” To say that something IS a value is to imply that it is of value, purely in and of itself, without respect to a human being who is willing to act to gain or to keep it. Now it’s perfectly legitimate to say, ‘That IS one of my values,” because you are a human being, and you are simply stating a fact of your consciousness.
We are individuals, each having his own mind and consciousness, and therefore, each having his own values. Values are things of the mind. “Value” exists only in the mind, and as such, they are intensely personal and individual. It’s possible for a group of people to share values, but it is not possible for the group, itself, to have values, because the group is only a collection of individuals. This is true whether you believe you evolved into what you are, or that you were created by God.
Some folks say, “Oh, he doesn’t have any values, at all.” Baloney. Everybody has values. Some people value things like their children, their freedom, their independence, etc., and other people value things like staying stoned, being stimulated by pornography, or having power over their neighbors. The desirability of something depends on the standard of moral value by which you judge good and bad. Just as you need a standard of value called a ruler to measure the length of something, you need a standard to measure the value of something. If your life as a human being – rational, independent, free, loving, creative, etc – is your greatest value, you will also value things that support that fundamental value. Your life, then becomes your standard of value.
On the other hand, if staying stoned is your greatest value, you will also value things that support that value. Staying stoned becomes the standard by which you measure good or bad, desirable or not desirable.
One of the greatest and most contemptible mockeries of values is the term, “family values. Does it mean things that contribute to a strong and happy family? Does it mean things that guarantee a lot of babies that can be sold on the world market? Does it mean a lot of daughters so the patriarch can have plenty of slaves? I can guarantee there are interpretations of the term “family values” that would gag a buzzard off a gut wagon!
So if anything can be a value, are there good and bad values? Your durned right! To be precise, there are good and bad standards of value. There is only one legitimate, absolutely fundamental standard of value: life, and specifically, life as a human being. Without this, there can be no values, at all; the entire subject could never come up if we were all dead. Life as a human being is the only truly fundamental standard of moral value.
Fundamental. There’s a term you don’t hear very often. It means there’s nothing greater than that one, fundamental thing. When you have a decision, you refer to your standard of moral value. Does course X or course Y support or promote your standard of value? If your standard of moral value is being popular, you will make your decision based on which will make you most popular. But suppose there’s a decision that transcends popularity – perhaps the welfare of a loved one. Your standard of moral value won’t help you answer that question because the matter has nothing to do with popularity.
We must temporarily play “lifeboat,” though I must caution against basing your values on lifeboat ethics. The world is not a lifeboat, ie not every decision must be based on whether you or the other guy dies. As an exercise, though, it can be very instructive to think about decisions in terms of promoting or protecting your life. Deciding if you are going to have the appetizer portion or the whole enchilada will not require you to ask which will contribute most to your life. You pick the one you like most, or feel most in the mood for, and that’s that. But never forget that, ultimately all decisions can be traced to your standard of value. Another way to think about it is that all decisions can be, if you want to work at it, reduced to the lowest common denominator, like a fraction.
(If you look at the things promoted and supported by statists, and think about the standard of value upon which they are based, you can see the “lifeboat ethics” implicit in their values. With them, everything is a matter of somebody dying if we don’t pass this tax law, or that bail out package. They will never offer everyday solutions to things because their philosophy has nothing to do with life. They are anti-life. Being in a lifeboat and having to decide who you’re going to eat is not an everyday situation, so it makes a lousy thing to base your values on! That doesn’t keep liberals from doing it.)
There’s a mess of folks out there with really screwed up standards of value. That’s their right, according to the rational nature of Man, and you can’t morally interfere with it. But you sure don’t have to pal around with ‘em, or trust ‘em behind your back! People whose standard of value is to have power over other people are especially dangerous, which is why proficiency at and possession of arms is a very life-promoting value! (It’s also why all liberals and other statists are universally against our having guns – and against term limits!)
A human being must be free to exercise his rational faculty, from primary senses to the most abstract conceptualization. Out of the rational process will come values. A human being must be free to pursue his values. The pursuit of our own values is one of the greatest glories of humanity; it has produced all of our art, our science, and our happiness. It may not be strictly correct to say that Man is the rational animal, but he is most certainly the animal that lives by rationality; he is a goal-directed animal.
There is what seems to be a horrific contradiction in this: cannot an individual place zero value on rationality? Yes, and in that case, the things he values must always come from others. If he would eat, someone else must value him enough to take action to gain food for him. Someone else must provide, by their own rationality and free will, everything he needs to survive. He becomes a slave to others. It seems odd to think of a thief as a slave, but he is: he lives only so long as his victims have the things he values, so he can steal from them. Similarly, a liar is a slave to the person to whom he has lied, because if that person stops believing him, his crummy little game is up.
No human can live without the mind and the actions directed by it. If one chooses to not use his own mind, he will live as a parasite off those who use theirs. The free exercise of the human mind means the pursuit of goals, which means the pursuit of values. Some people value things that contribute to life, others value things that are harmful to life.
VALUES
Like just about any other aspect of philosophy, the subject of values has taken a real whipping. Well, I’d like to take this opportunity to set the world straight on values. Much of what I’m about to say must be attributed to Ayn Rand, though hearing herself praised by a Mormon probably has her making about 1800 RPM in her grave.
Let’s take an unusual tack here, and start with a definition of “values.” A good definition will take most of the guesswork out of the rest of the subject. Value can be a verb or a noun. For right now, I’m talking about the noun, as in, “a value.” A value is anything a person takes action to gain or to keep. That’s it. Now there are a million other definitions, but I’ve never heard one that cut to the heart of the matter, and was instantly recognizable as fundamental. This definition, however, demands more discussion than can be put on a bumper sticker.
A lot of folks will try to tell you that X is a value, but Y is not. Baloney. It depends on the person doing the valuing! That’s the first real shocker here: without rational beings thinking and acting on their own volition, there are no values, because there’s no one to value anything. Without people desiring money, it could not be a value. Without people to desire life, it could not be a value. So, first of all, we are not talking about something that exists as an isolated concrete.
Anything can be a value. Socialists always sneer at money, because, knowing nothing about money, they think it is the only thing of value. I couldn’t tell you how many times I’ve said something about, “my values,” and been attacked for saying money is the most important thing in the world. They honestly believe that “value,” like “Yankee,” is half a word; they think the whole thing is “monetaryvalue.” Anyone who admits to valuing money in the presence of a socialist had better either have his foot in the stirrup or his holster unsnapped.
I’ve also had people say, “I’m not religious, so values aren’t important to me,” or, “I don’t have a family, so I don’t have any values.” How tragic that the Left has been so successful in perverting and twisting such a crucial subject.
A person can be a value. A ball, a book, a model airplane, freedom, a friend, a dog, a house, a car, money, righteousness, family, relationships…. All of these are things that person might act to gain or to keep, so all can be values. Note, I did not say, “…all ARE values!” To say that something IS a value is to imply that it is of value, purely in and of itself, without respect to a human being who is willing to act to gain or to keep it. Now it’s perfectly legitimate to say, ‘That IS one of my values,” because you are a human being, and you are simply stating a fact of your consciousness.
We are individuals, each having his own mind and consciousness, and therefore, each having his own values. Values are things of the mind. “Value” exists only in the mind, and as such, they are intensely personal and individual. It’s possible for a group of people to share values, but it is not possible for the group, itself, to have values, because the group is only a collection of individuals. This is true whether you believe you evolved into what you are, or that you were created by God.
Some folks say, “Oh, he doesn’t have any values, at all.” Baloney. Everybody has values. Some people value things like their children, their freedom, their independence, etc., and other people value things like staying stoned, being stimulated by pornography, or having power over their neighbors. The desirability of something depends on the standard of moral value by which you judge good and bad. Just as you need a standard of value called a ruler to measure the length of something, you need a standard to measure the value of something. If your life as a human being – rational, independent, free, loving, creative, etc – is your greatest value, you will also value things that support that fundamental value. Your life, then becomes your standard of value.
On the other hand, if staying stoned is your greatest value, you will also value things that support that value. Staying stoned becomes the standard by which you measure good or bad, desirable or not desirable.
One of the greatest and most contemptible mockeries of values is the term, “family values. Does it mean things that contribute to a strong and happy family? Does it mean things that guarantee a lot of babies that can be sold on the world market? Does it mean a lot of daughters so the patriarch can have plenty of slaves? I can guarantee there are interpretations of the term “family values” that would gag a buzzard off a gut wagon!
So if anything can be a value, are there good and bad values? Your durned right! To be precise, there are good and bad standards of value. There is only one legitimate, absolutely fundamental standard of value: life, and specifically, life as a human being. Without this, there can be no values, at all; the entire subject could never come up if we were all dead. Life as a human being is the only truly fundamental standard of moral value.
Fundamental. There’s a term you don’t hear very often. It means there’s nothing greater than that one, fundamental thing. When you have a decision, you refer to your standard of moral value. Does course X or course Y support or promote your standard of value? If your standard of moral value is being popular, you will make your decision based on which will make you most popular. But suppose there’s a decision that transcends popularity – perhaps the welfare of a loved one. Your standard of moral value won’t help you answer that question because the matter has nothing to do with popularity.
We must temporarily play “lifeboat,” though I must caution against basing your values on lifeboat ethics. The world is not a lifeboat, ie not every decision must be based on whether you or the other guy dies. As an exercise, though, it can be very instructive to think about decisions in terms of promoting or protecting your life. Deciding if you are going to have the appetizer portion or the whole enchilada will not require you to ask which will contribute most to your life. You pick the one you like most, or feel most in the mood for, and that’s that. But never forget that, ultimately all decisions can be traced to your standard of value. Another way to think about it is that all decisions can be, if you want to work at it, reduced to the lowest common denominator, like a fraction.
(If you look at the things promoted and supported by statists, and think about the standard of value upon which they are based, you can see the “lifeboat ethics” implicit in their values. With them, everything is a matter of somebody dying if we don’t pass this tax law, or that bail out package. They will never offer everyday solutions to things because their philosophy has nothing to do with life. They are anti-life. Being in a lifeboat and having to decide who you’re going to eat is not an everyday situation, so it makes a lousy thing to base your values on! That doesn’t keep liberals from doing it.)
There’s a mess of folks out there with really screwed up standards of value. That’s their right, according to the rational nature of Man, and you can’t morally interfere with it. But you sure don’t have to pal around with ‘em, or trust ‘em behind your back! People whose standard of value is to have power over other people are especially dangerous, which is why proficiency at and possession of arms is a very life-promoting value! (It’s also why all liberals and other statists are universally against our having guns – and against term limits!)
A human being must be free to exercise his rational faculty, from primary senses to the most abstract conceptualization. Out of the rational process will come values. A human being must be free to pursue his values. The pursuit of our own values is one of the greatest glories of humanity; it has produced all of our art, our science, and our happiness. It may not be strictly correct to say that Man is the rational animal, but he is most certainly the animal that lives by rationality; he is a goal-directed animal.
There is what seems to be a horrific contradiction in this: cannot an individual place zero value on rationality? Yes, and in that case, the things he values must always come from others. If he would eat, someone else must value him enough to take action to gain food for him. Someone else must provide, by their own rationality and free will, everything he needs to survive. He becomes a slave to others. It seems odd to think of a thief as a slave, but he is: he lives only so long as his victims have the things he values, so he can steal from them. Similarly, a liar is a slave to the person to whom he has lied, because if that person stops believing him, his crummy little game is up.
No human can live without the mind and the actions directed by it. If one chooses to not use his own mind, he will live as a parasite off those who use theirs. The free exercise of the human mind means the pursuit of goals, which means the pursuit of values. Some people value things that contribute to life, others value things that are harmful to life.
Saturday, January 30, 2010
Writing as a means of communication
I’ve been doing technical writing in one form or another for 30-odd years. Some of it has been fairly informal, like instruction on Civil War drill and tactics. Some of it has been in electronics or other manufacturing themes, and some in firearms instruction, history, or philosophy. Based on comments from people who have read it and used it on their jobs, I’m pretty good at it. I am, however, pretty old-fashioned in my approach to writing. I thought I’d take a break from the political crap and write a little bit about writing. Not saying I’m a geek, but it will be fun to write about my pet peeves in modern technical writing. I’d be interested in seeing your examples of new plots to sodomize a perfectly useable and innocent language.
Peeve number 1: Making up words when there are perfectly serviceable words available. Many of these made up words end in “-ness,” such as “sameness,” or “perfectness.” See there? My spell checker didn’t even pick up “sameness” as a phony word! We used to use “similarity,” or even “congruence.” The very worst places I’ve ever seen for made up words were the publications of politically correct, over-educated HR professionals. A lot of this stuff serves utterly no purpose, though, not even political correctness. For example, when I worked at Intel, I saw a notice posted in a hallway saying that one of the large machines was going to be removed from the factory, and that part of that hallway would be closed. However, the machine wasn’t going to be removed. It wasn’t even going to be “uninstalled.” (Thank you, Microsoft, for that one.) It was going to be “out positioned.” A memo at Digital urged us not to commit totally to our jobs, but to perform “…one-hundred percently.”
Peeve number 2: The use of certain words that are considered “professional.” The prime, number one example of such a word is “utilize.” Somewhere, I read a gag that said, “Never use use if you can utilize utilize.” When I worked at Digital Equipment Corp., one of my main jobs was editing our manuals and technical processes so our workforce could understand them. The training department had called in a contractor to do some literacy testing on the employees, and found the average reading level to be 3rd grade – and this included the engineers and managers! I would take these impossibly technical, jargon-filled monstrosities, and cut them down to a tenth their original size, add some illustrations, simplify or remove the jargon, delete the redundancy, and give them back to the engineers or managers for approval. In most cases, my work was approved and applauded. There was one engineer, though, who was utterly manic for using utilize. I had substituted use for utilize about 100 times in this one document. He red-penciled every stinkin’ one of ‘em and kicked it back to me. I changed ‘em again and sent it back. He complained to my manager, who wrote me up for being a racist. It seems I was forcing my white male chauvinist pig grammar down the throats the downtrodden masses. Another example of this is the phrase, “at this time.” What the hell’s wrong with saying, “now?”
Peeve number 3: Jargon. Actually, there are days when jargon takes over the top three spots on this list, all by itself! I work in the cell phone business, which is essentially an offshoot of the computer business, and jargon is omnipresent. I have counted up to 10 different terms for the same thing. In fact, I’ve seen three or four different terms used for the same thing in the same paragraph! Jargon is unavoidable is a highly dynamic, rapidly-changing field like technology, but, for cryin’ out loud, let’s not do our best to breed it! This is one point where professional writers have really let us down. The engineers who are inventing this stuff have to make up words because they are so often dealing with new things for which there is no established word. But when they send their work to the technical writing or training departments, there needs to be some sanity. This is not just a pet peeve of an old, anal-retentive wrench-bender. On my job, I would wager we waste tens of thousands of dollars every year due to jargon. For example, if I’m looking up how to do something on a phone, the first thing I have to do is figure out what it’s called. We do have a glossary, but it is time-consuming to look in it, and it only contains a small percentage of the terms, anyway. So I search for every similar term I can think of. Eventually, I might find it, but oftentimes I have to call for help. There have been times when I had found the answer, but continued to look for 20 or 30 more minutes because the terminology was different, and I didn’t know I’d found it!
As an aside, I would dearly love to have the time and money to spend a year or so researching and writing about the cultural implications of keyword-based information systems. (Keyword. Shouldn’t that be key word? Again, my spell checker thinks it’s okay. Humpf.) One person’s key word is not necessarily another person’s key word!
Peeve number 4: Acronyms. This is pretty much a corollary of number 3. The very best technical writing nowadays will have a glossary appended, or, if it’s an online document, a link to a glossary. How much time is wasted in looking up crap that should have been explained in the text? Instead of saying something like, “Change the ESN on the account,” and then basically putting the training on pause while the reader goes to the glossary to find ESN, the writer should say, “Change the Electronic Serial Number, or ESN….” From this point on, the acronym can be used because it has been defined in the context of the instruction. When I started at Intel, in 1993, they had an acronym dictionary. It was about 100 pages. The last version of it that I saw had almost 500 pages, and I think they finally gave up trying to document it, at all. I have seen sentences that were literally nothing more than a string of acronyms. Insane.
Peeve number 5: Noun pileup. Rather than using adjectives or adverbs, or modifying sentence structure to facilitate clarity, most tech writers will string together as many nouns as they possibly can to describe something. We might see something like, “cell phone pricing guide feature change order update analysis.” I have seen as many as 11 nouns used in a row, with no other grammatical elements. The problem with this is epistemological. The human mind can only keep track of about five or six concepts at one time. Leonard Piekoff called this the “crow epistemology.” I’ll write an essay on this, but for now, it just means that the human mind has to hold each noun as a separate entity until it is connected to other entities by modifiers, conjunctions, prepositions, pronouns, etc.. By the time you get to the end of a string of nouns, you have lost track of the first ones. In this example, we’re actually talking about an “analysis of the update to the way we order changes in pricing on our cell phone features.” When you take a common, straightforward phrase, jargonize it with non-existent words, string a bunch of them together, and then convert the resultant nonsense to an acronym, you have pretty much destroyed any hope of meaningful communication.
Peeve number 6: Himherheshe, also known as him/her, he/she. This is truly a masterstroke of the Progressive/political correctness movement. For centuries, it was accepted that, unless the gender of the subject were specified, the masculine form was to be used. This served us quite well until some educators managed to corrupt the conceptual ability of enough of their students that they were no longer able to comprehend the generalization. A huge number of women today are utterly incapable of seeing themselves as part of a species called “Man.” This has trivialized the very real discrimination against women, and wasted uncounted hours of time, and gallons of ink in re-writing otherwise legitimate and intelligible documents. Instead of focusing on real stereotypes, such as one I grew up with in which men were engineers and women were secretaries, we have been forced to focus on not giving imaginary offense to people who are committed to being offended by our very existence, anyway! I have seen otherwise good writing reduced to jibberish by gender/slashing. (Hey! I just invented that term! Maybe I’ll acronymize it, too!) It clutters the epistemological landscape like speed bumps. The mind must stop, read the gender/slash, and then go on. Personally, I will rewrite an entire passage, even using passive voice if I have to, in order to avoid a gender reference. Another popular solution is to mix references. Use masculine in one sentence, and feminine in the next. In his state of the union address, Barack Obama used an example of “… a student who…. her education.” I don’t remember him using a masculine reference, so maybe we should all be offended. To me, it seemed patronizing and petty, as if he found it necessary to remind us that a student could, feasibly, be a female. If he’d said, “…a young woman who… her education,” it would have been perfect.
Peeve number 7: Non-parallel construction. In one paragraph, a writer might list things in order from A through D, and in the next, list them C, B, D, A. This isn’t critical until the subject is a sequence, as in a progressive assembly line, or a programming sequence. Many instances of this are related to jargon, where the writer will change terminology in the middle of a piece. Parallel construction is another epistemological device that helps the human mind organize and retain information. Let’s say we have a process that involves five standards of five elements, each. If the information can be organized so it presents all the first elements as similar, or related, and all the second elements as similar or related, the whole is vastly easier to learn and retain than if it is presented as 25 conceptually unrelated elements.
Peeve number 8: Inverted sequence. Ever go through a complex set of steps, and then find an admonition at the end that says, “Before starting the above procedure…” or “The above procedure should be used only if….”? Makes me nuts. Put the conditions at the front, and keep the steps in numerical order. I have seen, recently, an instructional article that had about 15 steps. Step 6 said, “Before performing step 5…” What kind of an idiot writes things like that?
Well, this seems to have done wonders for my insomnia, so I’ll let it ride for now.
Peeve number 1: Making up words when there are perfectly serviceable words available. Many of these made up words end in “-ness,” such as “sameness,” or “perfectness.” See there? My spell checker didn’t even pick up “sameness” as a phony word! We used to use “similarity,” or even “congruence.” The very worst places I’ve ever seen for made up words were the publications of politically correct, over-educated HR professionals. A lot of this stuff serves utterly no purpose, though, not even political correctness. For example, when I worked at Intel, I saw a notice posted in a hallway saying that one of the large machines was going to be removed from the factory, and that part of that hallway would be closed. However, the machine wasn’t going to be removed. It wasn’t even going to be “uninstalled.” (Thank you, Microsoft, for that one.) It was going to be “out positioned.” A memo at Digital urged us not to commit totally to our jobs, but to perform “…one-hundred percently.”
Peeve number 2: The use of certain words that are considered “professional.” The prime, number one example of such a word is “utilize.” Somewhere, I read a gag that said, “Never use use if you can utilize utilize.” When I worked at Digital Equipment Corp., one of my main jobs was editing our manuals and technical processes so our workforce could understand them. The training department had called in a contractor to do some literacy testing on the employees, and found the average reading level to be 3rd grade – and this included the engineers and managers! I would take these impossibly technical, jargon-filled monstrosities, and cut them down to a tenth their original size, add some illustrations, simplify or remove the jargon, delete the redundancy, and give them back to the engineers or managers for approval. In most cases, my work was approved and applauded. There was one engineer, though, who was utterly manic for using utilize. I had substituted use for utilize about 100 times in this one document. He red-penciled every stinkin’ one of ‘em and kicked it back to me. I changed ‘em again and sent it back. He complained to my manager, who wrote me up for being a racist. It seems I was forcing my white male chauvinist pig grammar down the throats the downtrodden masses. Another example of this is the phrase, “at this time.” What the hell’s wrong with saying, “now?”
Peeve number 3: Jargon. Actually, there are days when jargon takes over the top three spots on this list, all by itself! I work in the cell phone business, which is essentially an offshoot of the computer business, and jargon is omnipresent. I have counted up to 10 different terms for the same thing. In fact, I’ve seen three or four different terms used for the same thing in the same paragraph! Jargon is unavoidable is a highly dynamic, rapidly-changing field like technology, but, for cryin’ out loud, let’s not do our best to breed it! This is one point where professional writers have really let us down. The engineers who are inventing this stuff have to make up words because they are so often dealing with new things for which there is no established word. But when they send their work to the technical writing or training departments, there needs to be some sanity. This is not just a pet peeve of an old, anal-retentive wrench-bender. On my job, I would wager we waste tens of thousands of dollars every year due to jargon. For example, if I’m looking up how to do something on a phone, the first thing I have to do is figure out what it’s called. We do have a glossary, but it is time-consuming to look in it, and it only contains a small percentage of the terms, anyway. So I search for every similar term I can think of. Eventually, I might find it, but oftentimes I have to call for help. There have been times when I had found the answer, but continued to look for 20 or 30 more minutes because the terminology was different, and I didn’t know I’d found it!
As an aside, I would dearly love to have the time and money to spend a year or so researching and writing about the cultural implications of keyword-based information systems. (Keyword. Shouldn’t that be key word? Again, my spell checker thinks it’s okay. Humpf.) One person’s key word is not necessarily another person’s key word!
Peeve number 4: Acronyms. This is pretty much a corollary of number 3. The very best technical writing nowadays will have a glossary appended, or, if it’s an online document, a link to a glossary. How much time is wasted in looking up crap that should have been explained in the text? Instead of saying something like, “Change the ESN on the account,” and then basically putting the training on pause while the reader goes to the glossary to find ESN, the writer should say, “Change the Electronic Serial Number, or ESN….” From this point on, the acronym can be used because it has been defined in the context of the instruction. When I started at Intel, in 1993, they had an acronym dictionary. It was about 100 pages. The last version of it that I saw had almost 500 pages, and I think they finally gave up trying to document it, at all. I have seen sentences that were literally nothing more than a string of acronyms. Insane.
Peeve number 5: Noun pileup. Rather than using adjectives or adverbs, or modifying sentence structure to facilitate clarity, most tech writers will string together as many nouns as they possibly can to describe something. We might see something like, “cell phone pricing guide feature change order update analysis.” I have seen as many as 11 nouns used in a row, with no other grammatical elements. The problem with this is epistemological. The human mind can only keep track of about five or six concepts at one time. Leonard Piekoff called this the “crow epistemology.” I’ll write an essay on this, but for now, it just means that the human mind has to hold each noun as a separate entity until it is connected to other entities by modifiers, conjunctions, prepositions, pronouns, etc.. By the time you get to the end of a string of nouns, you have lost track of the first ones. In this example, we’re actually talking about an “analysis of the update to the way we order changes in pricing on our cell phone features.” When you take a common, straightforward phrase, jargonize it with non-existent words, string a bunch of them together, and then convert the resultant nonsense to an acronym, you have pretty much destroyed any hope of meaningful communication.
Peeve number 6: Himherheshe, also known as him/her, he/she. This is truly a masterstroke of the Progressive/political correctness movement. For centuries, it was accepted that, unless the gender of the subject were specified, the masculine form was to be used. This served us quite well until some educators managed to corrupt the conceptual ability of enough of their students that they were no longer able to comprehend the generalization. A huge number of women today are utterly incapable of seeing themselves as part of a species called “Man.” This has trivialized the very real discrimination against women, and wasted uncounted hours of time, and gallons of ink in re-writing otherwise legitimate and intelligible documents. Instead of focusing on real stereotypes, such as one I grew up with in which men were engineers and women were secretaries, we have been forced to focus on not giving imaginary offense to people who are committed to being offended by our very existence, anyway! I have seen otherwise good writing reduced to jibberish by gender/slashing. (Hey! I just invented that term! Maybe I’ll acronymize it, too!) It clutters the epistemological landscape like speed bumps. The mind must stop, read the gender/slash, and then go on. Personally, I will rewrite an entire passage, even using passive voice if I have to, in order to avoid a gender reference. Another popular solution is to mix references. Use masculine in one sentence, and feminine in the next. In his state of the union address, Barack Obama used an example of “… a student who…. her education.” I don’t remember him using a masculine reference, so maybe we should all be offended. To me, it seemed patronizing and petty, as if he found it necessary to remind us that a student could, feasibly, be a female. If he’d said, “…a young woman who… her education,” it would have been perfect.
Peeve number 7: Non-parallel construction. In one paragraph, a writer might list things in order from A through D, and in the next, list them C, B, D, A. This isn’t critical until the subject is a sequence, as in a progressive assembly line, or a programming sequence. Many instances of this are related to jargon, where the writer will change terminology in the middle of a piece. Parallel construction is another epistemological device that helps the human mind organize and retain information. Let’s say we have a process that involves five standards of five elements, each. If the information can be organized so it presents all the first elements as similar, or related, and all the second elements as similar or related, the whole is vastly easier to learn and retain than if it is presented as 25 conceptually unrelated elements.
Peeve number 8: Inverted sequence. Ever go through a complex set of steps, and then find an admonition at the end that says, “Before starting the above procedure…” or “The above procedure should be used only if….”? Makes me nuts. Put the conditions at the front, and keep the steps in numerical order. I have seen, recently, an instructional article that had about 15 steps. Step 6 said, “Before performing step 5…” What kind of an idiot writes things like that?
Well, this seems to have done wonders for my insomnia, so I’ll let it ride for now.
Thursday, January 28, 2010
The Lunatic-in-chief
28 Jan, 2010
Last night, we listened to President Obama’s 2010 State of the Union address. At the time, I was stunned and, apart from the odd expletive, speechless.
Today, after thinking about it for a few hours, I have found my voice. We heard a full hour of the prating of a madman, and I will not flinch from calling him that. The man is crazy as a pet coon, but not nearly as endearing.
Over and over, he mentioned bipartisanship, and condemned it as being unproductive. He called those who have criticized him “petty.” He implied repeatedly that the only reason anyone disagreed with him was because they were a Republican. He criticized conservative talk radio and TV. He openly criticized the Supreme Court, and pretty much declared war on it. He accused the justices of undoing 100 years of progress, presumably referring to the establishment of the mongrel, bastard, statist model that has gotten us where we are today. We witnessed one of the justices of the Supreme Court, Sam Alito, shaking his head and telling the President of the United States, on live TV, in the chamber of the Congress, that he was wrong! How out of control is that?
Near the end of his speech, he called on Congress to join him in doing what was right for the children of America, whether or not it is what the parents of those children want. In other words, the president of the United States, on live, world-wide television, declared war on the opinions and desires of the American people. The government will do what’s best for your children. You sit down and shut up. The Congress gave him a standing ovation.
Very early in his speech, he said that a lot of Americans were mad at Washington for not being able to fix their problems. That’s probably true, because we have a hell of a lot of welfare looters and parasites and blood suckers in this country, and most of them just love the lunatic-in-chief who promises them the blood of their betters. However, Obama seemed totally unaware of the premise upon which this statement was based. That premise is the fundamental fallacy that we are all sitting out here waiting for Washington to take care of us. Nothing could be further from the truth!
A majority of Americans understand that Washington is the cause of most of our problems! We don’t want Washington to fix our problems; we want Washington to get the bloody hell out of the way, leave us the hell alone, and let us fix the problems, ourselves! The man can’t grasp that. He is intellectually and emotionally unable to grasp the fact that neither his race, party affiliation, ethnic/cultural background, nor any other superficial feature is what makes me despise him. I despise him because he is a statist tyrant, and the only things keeping him from being a mass murderer of his own countrymen are (1) the Constitution, in tatters though it might be, (2) time, and (3) about umpteen million of us sitting out here on a very large mountain of rifles and ammunition.
Barack Obama truly believes the crap he’s been advocating. He really, truly believes that he knows best what we need. He truly believes that no reasonable man could ever disagree with him. He truly believes that he has a mission to drive this republic in a direction that almost none of its citizens approves.
The man is mad. Stark, raving mad. He is as delusional as was Adolf Hitler, and, if you look at his theories, he’s every bit as savage and dangerous. He wants to make his mark on the world. So did Hitler, and he did. It wasn’t a very happy mark, but, by golly, he made it!
This man is very, very dangerous, but he’s not the most dangerous force in America. Even in collusion with Pelosi, Reid, and that set of execrable vermin, he’s not the most dangerous force in America. Even in collusion with the drooling, tyrant-worshipping news media, he’s not the most dangerous force in America. No, that honor goes to a very large segment of the American population.
We have, on the streets of this great nation, people who actually approve of Barack Obama! They still, after all that’s happened, think that moron is doing a good job! Those people, with their votes and their financial contributions, are far more dangerous than Obama. If Obama were taken from us tonight, the danger would not be gone because those people would still be out there.
Every time I see an Obama bumper sticker, I involuntarily wonder if the driver is a racist, a fascist, or an idiot. Those are the three categories of people to whom Obama appealed during the campaign, and those are the people who put him in power. Those people are still out there, doing all they can for him, whatever their motives.
And even if we were rid of Obama, they’d still be there, festering in our midst. So what do we do about them? Nothing. That’s right, not a flippin’ thing. Why? Because this is still a free country! We aren’t them! We don’t threaten or intimidate those who disagree with us – unless of course, they come after us, then that’s a whole ‘nother deal! Those people have a right to think what they want and vote for whomever they want to vote for, and we must never do anything to interfere with that, tempting as it may be. If the rights of any citizen are threatened, the rights of all citizens are threatened. The principles that disenfranchise one man may be used to disenfranchise any man.
What we must do is beat them at their own game. We must find candidates who have some moral fiber and a grasp of the nature of a free republic, and we must vote for them. We outnumber the idiots, so we can vote this current pack of scum out of office, and the idiots who put them there can’t do a thing about it. If they try…. well, that’s another story too.
But make no mistake: Barack Obama is a madman, and in combination with the Congress and the media, is a very dangerous madman. Let’s get him and his spawn out of power and see if we can salvage this nation.
Last night, we listened to President Obama’s 2010 State of the Union address. At the time, I was stunned and, apart from the odd expletive, speechless.
Today, after thinking about it for a few hours, I have found my voice. We heard a full hour of the prating of a madman, and I will not flinch from calling him that. The man is crazy as a pet coon, but not nearly as endearing.
Over and over, he mentioned bipartisanship, and condemned it as being unproductive. He called those who have criticized him “petty.” He implied repeatedly that the only reason anyone disagreed with him was because they were a Republican. He criticized conservative talk radio and TV. He openly criticized the Supreme Court, and pretty much declared war on it. He accused the justices of undoing 100 years of progress, presumably referring to the establishment of the mongrel, bastard, statist model that has gotten us where we are today. We witnessed one of the justices of the Supreme Court, Sam Alito, shaking his head and telling the President of the United States, on live TV, in the chamber of the Congress, that he was wrong! How out of control is that?
Near the end of his speech, he called on Congress to join him in doing what was right for the children of America, whether or not it is what the parents of those children want. In other words, the president of the United States, on live, world-wide television, declared war on the opinions and desires of the American people. The government will do what’s best for your children. You sit down and shut up. The Congress gave him a standing ovation.
Very early in his speech, he said that a lot of Americans were mad at Washington for not being able to fix their problems. That’s probably true, because we have a hell of a lot of welfare looters and parasites and blood suckers in this country, and most of them just love the lunatic-in-chief who promises them the blood of their betters. However, Obama seemed totally unaware of the premise upon which this statement was based. That premise is the fundamental fallacy that we are all sitting out here waiting for Washington to take care of us. Nothing could be further from the truth!
A majority of Americans understand that Washington is the cause of most of our problems! We don’t want Washington to fix our problems; we want Washington to get the bloody hell out of the way, leave us the hell alone, and let us fix the problems, ourselves! The man can’t grasp that. He is intellectually and emotionally unable to grasp the fact that neither his race, party affiliation, ethnic/cultural background, nor any other superficial feature is what makes me despise him. I despise him because he is a statist tyrant, and the only things keeping him from being a mass murderer of his own countrymen are (1) the Constitution, in tatters though it might be, (2) time, and (3) about umpteen million of us sitting out here on a very large mountain of rifles and ammunition.
Barack Obama truly believes the crap he’s been advocating. He really, truly believes that he knows best what we need. He truly believes that no reasonable man could ever disagree with him. He truly believes that he has a mission to drive this republic in a direction that almost none of its citizens approves.
The man is mad. Stark, raving mad. He is as delusional as was Adolf Hitler, and, if you look at his theories, he’s every bit as savage and dangerous. He wants to make his mark on the world. So did Hitler, and he did. It wasn’t a very happy mark, but, by golly, he made it!
This man is very, very dangerous, but he’s not the most dangerous force in America. Even in collusion with Pelosi, Reid, and that set of execrable vermin, he’s not the most dangerous force in America. Even in collusion with the drooling, tyrant-worshipping news media, he’s not the most dangerous force in America. No, that honor goes to a very large segment of the American population.
We have, on the streets of this great nation, people who actually approve of Barack Obama! They still, after all that’s happened, think that moron is doing a good job! Those people, with their votes and their financial contributions, are far more dangerous than Obama. If Obama were taken from us tonight, the danger would not be gone because those people would still be out there.
Every time I see an Obama bumper sticker, I involuntarily wonder if the driver is a racist, a fascist, or an idiot. Those are the three categories of people to whom Obama appealed during the campaign, and those are the people who put him in power. Those people are still out there, doing all they can for him, whatever their motives.
And even if we were rid of Obama, they’d still be there, festering in our midst. So what do we do about them? Nothing. That’s right, not a flippin’ thing. Why? Because this is still a free country! We aren’t them! We don’t threaten or intimidate those who disagree with us – unless of course, they come after us, then that’s a whole ‘nother deal! Those people have a right to think what they want and vote for whomever they want to vote for, and we must never do anything to interfere with that, tempting as it may be. If the rights of any citizen are threatened, the rights of all citizens are threatened. The principles that disenfranchise one man may be used to disenfranchise any man.
What we must do is beat them at their own game. We must find candidates who have some moral fiber and a grasp of the nature of a free republic, and we must vote for them. We outnumber the idiots, so we can vote this current pack of scum out of office, and the idiots who put them there can’t do a thing about it. If they try…. well, that’s another story too.
But make no mistake: Barack Obama is a madman, and in combination with the Congress and the media, is a very dangerous madman. Let’s get him and his spawn out of power and see if we can salvage this nation.
Sunday, January 24, 2010
My Testimony
Time for station identification. I am a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, generally called the Mormon Church. I believe in God The Father, in Jesus Christ, His Son, and in the Holy Ghost. If you were wondering where I stand on all this, here you go. I have to say, though, that Article 12 is a real challenge for me these days. And please note, none of the articles say we believe everybody but us Mormons is going to Hell. Here are
THE ARTICLES OF FAITH OF THE CHURCH OF JESUS CHRIST OF LATTER DAY SAINTS
(History of the Church, Vol. 4, pp. 535—541)
1. We believe in God, the Eternal Father, and in His Son, Jesus Christ,
and in the Holy Ghost.
2. We believe that men will be punished for their own sins, and not for
Adam’s transgression.
3. We believe that through the Atonement of Christ, all mankind may be
saved, by obedience to the laws and ordinances of the Gospel.
4. We believe that the first principles and ordinance of the Gospel are:
first, Faith in the Lord Jesus Christ; second, Repentance; third,
Baptism by immersion for the remission of sins; fourth, Laying
on of hands for the gift of the Holy Ghost.
5. We believe that a man must be called of God, by prophecy, and by
the laying on of hands by those who are in authority, to preach
the Gospel and administer the ordinances thereof.
6. We believe in the same organization that existed in the Primitive
Church, namely, apostles, prophets, pastors, teachers, evangelists,
and so forth.
7. We believe in the gift of tongues, prophecy, revelation, visions,
healing, interpretation of tongues, and so forth.
8. We believe the Bible to be the word of God as far as it is translated
correctly; we also believe the Book of Mormon to be the word of God.
9. We believe all that God has revealed, all that He does now reveal,
and we believe that He will yet reveal many great and important
things pertaining to the Kingdom of God.
10. We believe in the literal gathering of Israel and in the restoration
of the Ten Tribes; that Zion (the New Jerusalem) will be built
upon the American Continent; that Christ will reign personally upon
the earth; and, that the earth will be renewed and receive its
paradisiacal glory.
11. We claim the privilege of worshiping Almighty God according to the
dictates of our own conscience, and allow all men the same priv-
ilege, let them worship how, where, or what they may.
12. We believe in being subject to kings, presidents, rulers, and
magistrates, in obeying, honoring, and sustaining the law.
13. We believe in being honest, true, chaste, benevolent, virtuous,and
in doing good to all men; indeed, we may say that we follow the
admonition of Paul - We believe all things, we hope all things,
we have endured many things, and hope to be able to endure all
things. If there is anything virtuous, lovely, or of good report
or praiseworthy, we seek after these things.
----Joseph Smith
It is my testimony to anyone who reads this that the Book of Mormon is precisely what it claims to be: the word of Almighty God, transcribed from original records by His Prophet, Joseph Smith. No sane person can read that book and honestly say it is the work of a barely literate 14-year farm boy. It is not of this world. It is either of Heaven or of Hell, and there is no way Hell would ever offer up such a powerful, consuming testimony of The Lord Jesus Christ, of His mission, His gospel, and His atonement.
If the Book of Mormon cannot be of Hell, nor of a charlatan, then it must be of Heaven, and that is my personal testimony. If you would like to know for yourself, I’ll get you a copy. Pray about it, then read it, but don’t read it the way I did the first time back in ’76 or ’77. I was determined to find holes and absurdities in it, and like anyone who looks at something with a prejudice, I saw what I was prepared to see. However, what I saw had no relation to what I was actually looking at!
I caution you to not be like the Pharisees, who stood eyeball-to-eyeball with the Son of God and wanted to pick nits about the clothes, or his grammar, or whatever. Read the book with an open mind, to see if it has anything to offer you. If it does not, it can’t hurt you, and you will be the better for having experienced a wonderful story.
The Savior told Peter that the testimony, or witness of the Holy Ghost was the rock upon which He’d build His church. Do not apply the wisdom of Man to the Wisdom of God; you’ll come up ‘way short. Yes, you might think you’ve found holes in the book, but you will be shortchanging yourself. Build your testimony on the rock, not on what you think you know.
There are some who will remember my atheist/Objectivist period. For about 15 years, I was a fire-breathing atheist. No one could stand against me because of the polemic skill provided by Ayn Rand, Leonard Peikoff, and other Objectivist philosophers. I talked several people away from religion, and that is something I deeply regret. I’ve found a few of them and told them I was wrong. The problem was that my life wasn’t working the way I wanted it to. Ironically, it was Rand’s principle of questioning your premises that allowed me to get outside my box and look at religion. At the time, I was associating in a business venture with several Mormons, and listened to what they had to say. Their lives were producing what I wanted – not just materially, but in all regards.
I started reading the Book of Mormon and took the standard six introductory lessons from the missionaries. I fooled around with it for two years. My wife at the time was fanatically anti-Mormon because she was once abused by a punk of a husband whose family may have been Mormon. Never mind that if the church had known what he was doing, he’d have been excommunicated – assuming he really was a member of the church.
Anyway, I wore out about a dozen missionaries, asking a million questions. Finally, one of them told me straight out that they had other people to work with, and I was going to have to fish or cut bait. Someone had given me a few copies of a church magazine called, “The Ensign.” One day, when my wife was out of town, I was sitting in the floor, reading one of them. Suddenly, without warning or preamble, I had the most overwhelming sense of being inundated – literally flooded – with warm, soft love. At the same moment, I had an impression of something in my head saying, “This is right, Wess. What you are doing is right. Go to the next step.” The feeling and the message lasted about three or four minutes, then faded, leaving me filled with a drowsy peacefulness.
Now anyone who knew me in that era will tell you that such emotional responses to what I called ghost stories were very, very far from my character. I’m capable of crying at John Wayne movies, or about episodes from history. Emotional response has always been one of my best things, but never anything like that. And never without some warning, or some external cause. Afterward, I went back and read that page again, and there was nothing there that could have elicited such a response.
The next week, I made an appointment to be baptized, and have never questioned or regretted the decision for an instant. Since becoming a member of the church, I’ve sinned pretty significantly a few times, but on other occasions, when I’d done my part, I’ve had revelations that were absolutely, unquestionably NOT things I’d ever come up with – and they were always right.
Again, I testify to all who read this that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints is just exactly that: Christ’s church in this, the final dispensation of Earth’s history. I also promise you that if you do not agree with that, nor believe the things I’ve said here, you will not go to Hell. Well, you might finagle a ticket there on your own, but it won’t be because you aren’t a Mormon. Jesus is the Christ. He lives. He loves us all, and He died on the cross to atone for our sins. He will return to claim the Earth that is rightfully His.
I lay this, most humbly, at your feet, and call you my brothers and sisters, in the Name of Our Savior, Jesus Christ. Amen.
THE ARTICLES OF FAITH OF THE CHURCH OF JESUS CHRIST OF LATTER DAY SAINTS
(History of the Church, Vol. 4, pp. 535—541)
1. We believe in God, the Eternal Father, and in His Son, Jesus Christ,
and in the Holy Ghost.
2. We believe that men will be punished for their own sins, and not for
Adam’s transgression.
3. We believe that through the Atonement of Christ, all mankind may be
saved, by obedience to the laws and ordinances of the Gospel.
4. We believe that the first principles and ordinance of the Gospel are:
first, Faith in the Lord Jesus Christ; second, Repentance; third,
Baptism by immersion for the remission of sins; fourth, Laying
on of hands for the gift of the Holy Ghost.
5. We believe that a man must be called of God, by prophecy, and by
the laying on of hands by those who are in authority, to preach
the Gospel and administer the ordinances thereof.
6. We believe in the same organization that existed in the Primitive
Church, namely, apostles, prophets, pastors, teachers, evangelists,
and so forth.
7. We believe in the gift of tongues, prophecy, revelation, visions,
healing, interpretation of tongues, and so forth.
8. We believe the Bible to be the word of God as far as it is translated
correctly; we also believe the Book of Mormon to be the word of God.
9. We believe all that God has revealed, all that He does now reveal,
and we believe that He will yet reveal many great and important
things pertaining to the Kingdom of God.
10. We believe in the literal gathering of Israel and in the restoration
of the Ten Tribes; that Zion (the New Jerusalem) will be built
upon the American Continent; that Christ will reign personally upon
the earth; and, that the earth will be renewed and receive its
paradisiacal glory.
11. We claim the privilege of worshiping Almighty God according to the
dictates of our own conscience, and allow all men the same priv-
ilege, let them worship how, where, or what they may.
12. We believe in being subject to kings, presidents, rulers, and
magistrates, in obeying, honoring, and sustaining the law.
13. We believe in being honest, true, chaste, benevolent, virtuous,and
in doing good to all men; indeed, we may say that we follow the
admonition of Paul - We believe all things, we hope all things,
we have endured many things, and hope to be able to endure all
things. If there is anything virtuous, lovely, or of good report
or praiseworthy, we seek after these things.
----Joseph Smith
It is my testimony to anyone who reads this that the Book of Mormon is precisely what it claims to be: the word of Almighty God, transcribed from original records by His Prophet, Joseph Smith. No sane person can read that book and honestly say it is the work of a barely literate 14-year farm boy. It is not of this world. It is either of Heaven or of Hell, and there is no way Hell would ever offer up such a powerful, consuming testimony of The Lord Jesus Christ, of His mission, His gospel, and His atonement.
If the Book of Mormon cannot be of Hell, nor of a charlatan, then it must be of Heaven, and that is my personal testimony. If you would like to know for yourself, I’ll get you a copy. Pray about it, then read it, but don’t read it the way I did the first time back in ’76 or ’77. I was determined to find holes and absurdities in it, and like anyone who looks at something with a prejudice, I saw what I was prepared to see. However, what I saw had no relation to what I was actually looking at!
I caution you to not be like the Pharisees, who stood eyeball-to-eyeball with the Son of God and wanted to pick nits about the clothes, or his grammar, or whatever. Read the book with an open mind, to see if it has anything to offer you. If it does not, it can’t hurt you, and you will be the better for having experienced a wonderful story.
The Savior told Peter that the testimony, or witness of the Holy Ghost was the rock upon which He’d build His church. Do not apply the wisdom of Man to the Wisdom of God; you’ll come up ‘way short. Yes, you might think you’ve found holes in the book, but you will be shortchanging yourself. Build your testimony on the rock, not on what you think you know.
There are some who will remember my atheist/Objectivist period. For about 15 years, I was a fire-breathing atheist. No one could stand against me because of the polemic skill provided by Ayn Rand, Leonard Peikoff, and other Objectivist philosophers. I talked several people away from religion, and that is something I deeply regret. I’ve found a few of them and told them I was wrong. The problem was that my life wasn’t working the way I wanted it to. Ironically, it was Rand’s principle of questioning your premises that allowed me to get outside my box and look at religion. At the time, I was associating in a business venture with several Mormons, and listened to what they had to say. Their lives were producing what I wanted – not just materially, but in all regards.
I started reading the Book of Mormon and took the standard six introductory lessons from the missionaries. I fooled around with it for two years. My wife at the time was fanatically anti-Mormon because she was once abused by a punk of a husband whose family may have been Mormon. Never mind that if the church had known what he was doing, he’d have been excommunicated – assuming he really was a member of the church.
Anyway, I wore out about a dozen missionaries, asking a million questions. Finally, one of them told me straight out that they had other people to work with, and I was going to have to fish or cut bait. Someone had given me a few copies of a church magazine called, “The Ensign.” One day, when my wife was out of town, I was sitting in the floor, reading one of them. Suddenly, without warning or preamble, I had the most overwhelming sense of being inundated – literally flooded – with warm, soft love. At the same moment, I had an impression of something in my head saying, “This is right, Wess. What you are doing is right. Go to the next step.” The feeling and the message lasted about three or four minutes, then faded, leaving me filled with a drowsy peacefulness.
Now anyone who knew me in that era will tell you that such emotional responses to what I called ghost stories were very, very far from my character. I’m capable of crying at John Wayne movies, or about episodes from history. Emotional response has always been one of my best things, but never anything like that. And never without some warning, or some external cause. Afterward, I went back and read that page again, and there was nothing there that could have elicited such a response.
The next week, I made an appointment to be baptized, and have never questioned or regretted the decision for an instant. Since becoming a member of the church, I’ve sinned pretty significantly a few times, but on other occasions, when I’d done my part, I’ve had revelations that were absolutely, unquestionably NOT things I’d ever come up with – and they were always right.
Again, I testify to all who read this that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints is just exactly that: Christ’s church in this, the final dispensation of Earth’s history. I also promise you that if you do not agree with that, nor believe the things I’ve said here, you will not go to Hell. Well, you might finagle a ticket there on your own, but it won’t be because you aren’t a Mormon. Jesus is the Christ. He lives. He loves us all, and He died on the cross to atone for our sins. He will return to claim the Earth that is rightfully His.
I lay this, most humbly, at your feet, and call you my brothers and sisters, in the Name of Our Savior, Jesus Christ. Amen.
Nature of Man with a gun
If it’s proper for Man to be free, what about those among us who would destroy our freedom? How should we respond to them? Should we resist? I believe that tyranny should be resisted with heart and soul. I include the governmental type of tyranny, and also the local, individual type. The thug who sticks a gun in your ribs in the parking lot is the soul mate of Nancy Pelosi. Both deprive you of your right to learn, to think, and to act – ie, of your very humanity. If it is right that Man should be free, it must also be right that he have the means of defending his freedom. Otherwise, we’d have to say, “It is right that Man should be free, unless someone disagrees.”
Should there be a limit to the level of tyranny we might morally resist? For example, should we be allowed to resist that tyranny which can be resisted with spears, only, or should we be allowed to resist that which can be resisted with rifles? Any attempt to delimit Man’s means of defending his freedom also delimits his freedom and makes it conditional upon the whims of other men. Should we be allowed to posses the means of resisting the tyranny of a single thug, but not of a gang? Again, that is the equivalent of saying, “Man ought to be free, unless several people think otherwise.”
No one who has ever come face to face with a gang in a dark parking lot will ever ask why a citizen needs a battle rifle! You’re damn right they are meant for killing large numbers of people! Sometimes, you run into large numbers of people that need killin’!
Just as freedom must include the entire rational process as well as physical action, so must the right to defend that freedom include all circumstances. It must also include, not only the means (a firearm) but the freedom to use it in self-defense. For example, some Brits claim they have the right to own guns, but the limits placed on their carrying, or even handling of their own guns makes such a claim preposterous. Their government has said, “You can have title to these things, but we will maintain possession of and control over them, and if you ever touch one without our permission, we’ll crucify you.” That is NOT the right to self-defense with deadly force.
The right to self-defense with deadly force is part and parcel of the right to live as human beings. To infringe on it is the same as censoring the news or literature, or forbidding certain inventions (as the kerosene lamp was once banned to protect the candle makers). To force Man to live at the pleasure or whim of his neighbors or his government is nothing short of slavery, which is nothing short of the murder of his humanity. It is one thing to publish an article of faith that says we sustain the law, and to invite or even beg folks to subscribe to that article. It is quite another to deprive them of the very means of disagreement. To limit Man’s choices is Satan’s plan, or, if you prefer, it is anti-evolutionary because it stands in the way of natural selection. Either way, it is tyranny and it is despicable.
The idea of licensing firearms, or requiring permits for their purchase or carrying is just as much an infringement on freedom as the outright banning of arms. “Oh, no,” you say. “There’s nothing wrong with reasonable controls and restrictions.” Bullcrap. Who’s reason? Yours? What if my reason says I need to be packing right now, and I don’t have time to fool around for three months getting a permit? License and permit laws say, quite literally, “You have a right to defend your life ONLY if you fill out this form in triplicate and take this course from some guy who may or may not be worth shooting, himself. If you encounter a deadly threat in the meantime, your right to life is hereby revoked.”
“But felons shouldn’t be allowed to have guns!” Bullcrap. If someone is loose on the street, there is no way of keeping them from getting or making a gun. As far as that goes, a club or a chain is bloody effective, too, especially if there are a dozen or so guys swinging them at you. My dear cousin, Kathy, was murdered by a convicted felon who used a brick from her garden to crush her skull. Kathy didn’t believe in packing a gun, and now the world must go on without her. I miss her something awful.
Since we can’t keep people from arming themselves and hurting others, why do we posture and pretend that we can? If they can’t be trusted with weapons, why are they loose, in the first place? If they can’t be trusted with weapons, keep ‘em in jail or euthanize ‘em. If we’re going to turn ‘em loose, then we should have the nerve to let ‘em be fully human, and if they screw up again, it’s the noose, for sure. The problem isn’t with the availability of guns to criminals. The problem is the presence among us of violent criminals, running amok and without fear.
I have no problem with a pacifist. I have no use for the silly dip, either. But I really, REALLY have a problem with the pacifist who wants to force is lunacy down my throat, and leave my daughters bare before the ravisher. A man who won’t fight for what’s right is, in the words of John Paul Jones, “…a thief of the food he eats and a trespasser in the bunk in which he sleeps.” We’re back to differences and opposites, again. The pacifist says there is no difference between good and evil, and that good has a right to exist only so long as evil will allow it. That, in my opinion, equals a win for evil. Anyone who does not hate evil and fight against it is an ally of evil. There is one exception: anyone who has covenanted with God that he will not take up arms against his fellow man is excluded from this condemnation, but only so long as that man humbly acknowledges that his mortal life is owed to those who defend it for him.
I’ve heard this quote attributed to everyone from Thomas Jefferson to George Orwell, but I love it: “We sleep peacefully in our beds because rough men stand ready to visit violence upon those who mean us harm.” Heinlein had it right in “Beyond This Horizon.” A person has every right to wear a peace brassard, but he must consider himself a second-class citizen, taking his place behind those whose being armed ensure his right to survive the consequences of his decision.
Should there be a limit to the level of tyranny we might morally resist? For example, should we be allowed to resist that tyranny which can be resisted with spears, only, or should we be allowed to resist that which can be resisted with rifles? Any attempt to delimit Man’s means of defending his freedom also delimits his freedom and makes it conditional upon the whims of other men. Should we be allowed to posses the means of resisting the tyranny of a single thug, but not of a gang? Again, that is the equivalent of saying, “Man ought to be free, unless several people think otherwise.”
No one who has ever come face to face with a gang in a dark parking lot will ever ask why a citizen needs a battle rifle! You’re damn right they are meant for killing large numbers of people! Sometimes, you run into large numbers of people that need killin’!
Just as freedom must include the entire rational process as well as physical action, so must the right to defend that freedom include all circumstances. It must also include, not only the means (a firearm) but the freedom to use it in self-defense. For example, some Brits claim they have the right to own guns, but the limits placed on their carrying, or even handling of their own guns makes such a claim preposterous. Their government has said, “You can have title to these things, but we will maintain possession of and control over them, and if you ever touch one without our permission, we’ll crucify you.” That is NOT the right to self-defense with deadly force.
The right to self-defense with deadly force is part and parcel of the right to live as human beings. To infringe on it is the same as censoring the news or literature, or forbidding certain inventions (as the kerosene lamp was once banned to protect the candle makers). To force Man to live at the pleasure or whim of his neighbors or his government is nothing short of slavery, which is nothing short of the murder of his humanity. It is one thing to publish an article of faith that says we sustain the law, and to invite or even beg folks to subscribe to that article. It is quite another to deprive them of the very means of disagreement. To limit Man’s choices is Satan’s plan, or, if you prefer, it is anti-evolutionary because it stands in the way of natural selection. Either way, it is tyranny and it is despicable.
The idea of licensing firearms, or requiring permits for their purchase or carrying is just as much an infringement on freedom as the outright banning of arms. “Oh, no,” you say. “There’s nothing wrong with reasonable controls and restrictions.” Bullcrap. Who’s reason? Yours? What if my reason says I need to be packing right now, and I don’t have time to fool around for three months getting a permit? License and permit laws say, quite literally, “You have a right to defend your life ONLY if you fill out this form in triplicate and take this course from some guy who may or may not be worth shooting, himself. If you encounter a deadly threat in the meantime, your right to life is hereby revoked.”
“But felons shouldn’t be allowed to have guns!” Bullcrap. If someone is loose on the street, there is no way of keeping them from getting or making a gun. As far as that goes, a club or a chain is bloody effective, too, especially if there are a dozen or so guys swinging them at you. My dear cousin, Kathy, was murdered by a convicted felon who used a brick from her garden to crush her skull. Kathy didn’t believe in packing a gun, and now the world must go on without her. I miss her something awful.
Since we can’t keep people from arming themselves and hurting others, why do we posture and pretend that we can? If they can’t be trusted with weapons, why are they loose, in the first place? If they can’t be trusted with weapons, keep ‘em in jail or euthanize ‘em. If we’re going to turn ‘em loose, then we should have the nerve to let ‘em be fully human, and if they screw up again, it’s the noose, for sure. The problem isn’t with the availability of guns to criminals. The problem is the presence among us of violent criminals, running amok and without fear.
I have no problem with a pacifist. I have no use for the silly dip, either. But I really, REALLY have a problem with the pacifist who wants to force is lunacy down my throat, and leave my daughters bare before the ravisher. A man who won’t fight for what’s right is, in the words of John Paul Jones, “…a thief of the food he eats and a trespasser in the bunk in which he sleeps.” We’re back to differences and opposites, again. The pacifist says there is no difference between good and evil, and that good has a right to exist only so long as evil will allow it. That, in my opinion, equals a win for evil. Anyone who does not hate evil and fight against it is an ally of evil. There is one exception: anyone who has covenanted with God that he will not take up arms against his fellow man is excluded from this condemnation, but only so long as that man humbly acknowledges that his mortal life is owed to those who defend it for him.
I’ve heard this quote attributed to everyone from Thomas Jefferson to George Orwell, but I love it: “We sleep peacefully in our beds because rough men stand ready to visit violence upon those who mean us harm.” Heinlein had it right in “Beyond This Horizon.” A person has every right to wear a peace brassard, but he must consider himself a second-class citizen, taking his place behind those whose being armed ensure his right to survive the consequences of his decision.
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