The Opposition

Most of the people who support Progressive politicians can give you many reasons for doing that. All you have to do is find someone who strongly supports Obama and ask him or her what he's all about. You'll hear things like equality, world peace, protecting the environment, freedom of choice, and many other such lofty goals. They actually believe that their Progressive candidates want these things, and worse, that Conservative opponents want the opposite things. In other words, they believe Conservatives don't want equality. They believe war is a good thing. They believe the environment can take care of itself. They want to prevent people from doing things, taking away their freedom of choice.

Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, the opposite is true, and that's clearly evident if you stop to look at both sides objectively. In order to do that, you must look at what both sides have done, not what they say they'll do, or talked about doing.

Were the founders of America Conservative or Progressive. Ask most people who support Progressives and they'll tell you those folks were Progressives. They were not. They were, in fact, the exact opposite. Progressives seek to transform America into a place that looks more like the places that America's first citizens wanted to flee, not what they sought to build.

Let's break this down, shall we?

Equality sounds like an admirable goal, doesn't it? I mean, wouldn't the world be a better place if everyone was truly equal? Actually, if that were true, you wouldn't be able to tell if the world was a better place or not. Better than what? If there's no alternative, there's nothing to measure. You can't win if nobody can lose. You can't be poor or rich if everyone has the same amount of wealth. True equality can't exist, unless everyone is equally dead. The healthy can't support the sick if everyone is equally healthy, or sick. Some inequality is outside human control. Putting people into classes is a trick Progressives use to control certain groups of people. If they can turn one class of people against another, they can take sides with the larger class and win a majority vote. But is the larger side the side that makes the world a better place? Not usually.

Things like wealth, age, popularity, beauty, intelligence, productivity, and just about anything else you can measure, are not equal. They are actually distributed in different proportions. Almost all these things are distributed roughly following a "bell curve" where a smaller number of people exist at either end, and the majority of people fall into the middle. Most people have some wealth, but are not rich. Most people are neither terribly ugly or incredibly good looking. Few people have no friends at all, and few people have thousands of friends. Most fall in the middle.

The distribution of people by age isn't quite a bell curve. That's because everybody who is born eventually dies, and we all die at different ages. Nobody comes back to life once they're dead. So the number of young people is normally larger than the number of middle-age people, and the number of elderly people is normally smaller than any other group. The number of people over 100 years of age is extremely small.

Intelligence and knowledge are not the same things. Intelligence is best described as the ability to think and reason. The distribution of intelligence does tend to follow a bell curve. Few people are idiots, and there aren't very many people who are a true genius. Most are somewhere in the middle. Knowledge, however, can be manipulated. If the schools aren't doing a good job, you can end up skewing the population, artificially creating a larger number of people who lack general knowledge.

Let's say you want to get elected. Which people should you try to represent? If you want the most votes, you'd go after the largest groups. That would be middle income, average people. But, if you can control the schools and dumb-down the population, you can create a large group of stupid people. Shortly after you've started doing this, that large group will include mainly younger people, since the older ones went to school before you screwed up the system. Stupid people are easier to trick than smart people. Therefore, if you're a dishonest politician, you can convince the stupid that you want what's best for them, even if you don't. You wouldn't have an easy time doing that if there were fewer stupid people. So, if you're doing something like this to trick people into supporting you, what would your position be on something like the voting age? Of course, you'd want to make the voting age as low as possible. This is based on the assumption that the votes added to the system when you lower the voting age will include a larger percentage of stupid people, thanks to the damages you've done to the school system.

Progressives have been destroying our schools in America for many years. They've done this deliberately in order to grow a large number of stupid voters. Those stupid voters are easily manipulated, especially when you can reach them on an emotional level. Suppose you told them that they're stupid because they've been screwed by the smart people? You'd be pitting a large number of stupid people against a smaller number of smarter people, and you'd position yourself as champion of the stupid. You get those votes.

You can do the same thing with wealth. If you pick any point on a bell curve that is right of center, you'll have more people on the left than the right. If only one percent of the population is worth more than one million dollars, those people are at the extreme right end of the bell curve. That means that 99% of the people are not millionaires. Which group do you appeal to if you want to get the most votes? Those in the 99%, of course.

Now think about this. If you're using these tactics, are you interested in making the schools better so people can be smarter? Nope. If you do that, you'd be reducing the number of stupid people, and therefore limiting your votes. Are you interested in helping people earn more money? Of course not. That might move them into the top 1% and take them out of your pool of voters. In fact, to be safe, you want even more stupid people. You also want more people to be poor. That builds your voting base. Any other actions could shrink your base of support.

Progressives are not looking out for poor people. They're taking advantage of them. They're not interested in helping people out of poverty. Actually, it's in their best interest to push more people into poverty. Once they're poor, they can control them using entitlement programs paid for by the rich, which is a much smaller group of people. Screw the rich to feed the poor is politically a brilliant idea because the ones you're hurting, the rich, represent fewer votes by far than the poor people you claim to be "helping" with government support.

What about jobs? Is it a good thing for Progressives to help businesses create more jobs? Of course not. That could tip the scales and push people out of poverty, thus costing them votes. You want to destroy jobs so you can get more people to depend on your government programs. Those who rely on your programs to survive will be far more likely to vote for the candidate who supports those programs and talks about expanding them.

If you're a Progressive, do you want people to have more choice or less? Prosperity gives you the freedom to expand your choices. As you move farther away from poverty, you can afford to buy more expensive things. Your ability to choose increases. That's not what a Progressive wants, not because they don't want people to have nice things, but because those who don't have things are easier to manipulate into voters. Therefore, Progressives do whatever they can to destroy jobs, or prevent new ones from being created.

Take any issue and study it objectively. Using the same logic, you can determine which side of that issue a Progressive is likely to support. It's always the side that creates more control over people who vote to keep them in power. That would be the poor and stupid people, because they're easily manipulated.

Abortion? That's tricky. You might think that Progressives would be against abortion because it takes away a potential voter. But, that's not the whole story. Which people are most likely to want an abortion, the rich or the poor? The stupid or the smart? Smart people with money usually want to raise a family. Those who are poor can't afford to raise a family. Those who are stupid might not be interested in raising a family. Progressives do better if they support abortion because abortions tend to keep people poor and stupid. If you can do stupid things and not pay the consequences of your actions, you'll learn nothing from the experience and keep on doing stupid things. If you don't get that abortion, you're forced to raise a family, which means you should go out and get a job, which means you'll be moving away from poverty. For a Progressive, this means a lost vote.

Racial equality? You'd think Progressives would appeal to the largest racial component of the population. But they make themselves out to be champions of those in the minority. Why? The answer lies in demographics. Thanks to racial inequality in the past, the percentage of people of certain races who are poor and stupid are much higher than the same ratio among the majority race. If you appeal to those who are in those minorities, you're more likely to find stupid and poor people you can control. Therefore, the advantage goes to Progressives, again.

War? Progressives use a war to play on strong emotions among their followers. This is a great way to manipulate the stupid and poor. If you can make them believe that war is bad, and convince them that you take their side on that position, you win votes as long as a war is raging somewhere. Bring home our troops! End the war! War is not the answer! Of course, you don't really want to end the war if you're a Progressive, do you? That takes away a powerful tool that you're using to control people and keep them voting for you. On the contrary, it's in your best interests if there are always wars going on somewhere. You don't end wars, you start them and expand them.

Now let's look at all these issues from a Conservative point of view. Conservatives don't believe in a large central government that controls the masses. They believe in individuals. They want to life people out of poverty. They appeal to those people who work, produce things, invent things, earn money, raise families, and amass as much wealth as they possibly can. They're not interested in keeping people poor. They need the poor to be lifted out of poverty. Once they're no longer oppressed, they'll be far more likely to see through the cage that Progressives have built to keep them in poverty. They'll come over to the other side and become conservative voters.

What about racial equality? As long as most people in minority races believe that everyone else is holding them back, they'll continue to support those who claim to be working against those people. Conservatives want to erase the artificial barriers that are created through the division of people by race. If all people have an equal opportunity to succeed, more of them will succeed. That means more voters for Conservatives. Conservatives really want racial equality. The less one race is perceived as being inferior to another, the move Conservative votes are created. Progressives, therefore, want the opposite. Racial inequality is the key to racial division and hatred, turning one group into victims of the other, while the Progressives step in to play the role of savior. They have no intention of correcting inequality because doing so would cost them votes.

The bottom line is that most people who vote for Progressives are actually cooperating with the very group that is keeping them from improving their lifestyle. They're working toward limiting their own freedom. They don't see this because they're blinded by emotion. The most powerful controlling emotion is hatred. In the name of love, Progressive voters are taught to hate Conservatives. That hatred is the fuel that keeps the Progressive fires burning. It's the source of power for Progressives. They would never do anything to put that fire out. They'd rather throw gasoline on it than water. It's a matter of self-preservation, after all.

It's A Wonderful Life

I just finished watching It's A Wonderful Life again. I'll bet I've watched that movie thirty times since I first discovered it back in the late 1970's. I came home from work at the radio station very late one night and turned on the TV. The only station still on the air was WAKR in Akron, Ohio, which had recently moved from Channel 49 to Channel 23 and increased power. Their signal now reached the Cleveland area fairly well, even clearly if you had an outside antenna on a rotor. They were showing old black and white movies all night and It's A Wonderful Life happened to be running. It was near the beginning and I started watching it. I had no idea how long it was, but I didn't plan to stay up late to watch the whole thing. I was so captivated by the story, I had to keep watching all the way to the end. The sun was starting to rise before I got to bed!

Watching It's A Wonderful Life this time started me thinking about how much America has changed over the past 100 years. Something happened around 1909 that gradually, progressively, infected our political process and corrupted both political parties. This movie starts out with George Bailey as a young boy in 1919, right in the middle of the Woodrow Wilson administration. When George Bailey would have been born, Teddy Roosevelt was president. He was elected as a Republican, but he became a Progressive before his two terms ended in 1909. He formed a third party called the Bull Moose which formed the very beginnings of a Progressive movement. He was followed by William Howard Taft, a Conservative Republican, who served only one term. The Progressives were struggling to gain control of America, and they set about to do that by infiltrating the Democrat party. In 1913, Woodrow Wilson was elected. He called himself a Democrat, but he was actually a Progressive. He was very different from the Democrats who came before him. He was addicted to power and sought to greatly expand America's central government, and with it, the Ruling Class. This was directly in opposition to the original intent of our country, based on the Constitution, limited central government, States rights, and individual freedom. Prior to the infiltration of Progressives, these ideals were held sacred by both political parties. Things had changed.

Newspaper publisher Warren G Harding took office after Woodrow Wilson's second term. He was a Conservative Republican who campaigned as a supporter of the League Of Nations (now the United Nations). After he got elected, he fought to keep America out of that organization. On his watch, however, many of his friends began taking advantage of the positions of power they'd been given. The result was scandal. Some believed that President Harding was responsible for everything, including actions that took place without his knowledge or consent. Perhaps that's true of any President. President Harding didn't live long enough to find out how these scandals would be resolved. He died of a heart attack two years into his Presidency while visiting San Francisco. His Vice President, Calvin Coolidge, was sworn in on August 2, 1923.

Calvin Coolidge was a Conservative Republican who sought to restore the dignity of the Presidency. During his term, America's economy was booming. It was known as The Roaring Twenties. This period is depicted in the movie as the time when George Bailey and Mary dance the Jitterbug right into the school swimming pool under the gym floor.

George Bailey's father ran the Bailey Building And Loan. Mr. Potter was portrayed as an evil rich man who bought shares of that business and then tried to take it over when George's father died. The Board of Directors voted to keep the Building And Loan operating, provided George stayed on to take his father's place as Executive Secretary of the business. George reluctantly agreed to stay. Based on events in the movie, George gets married to Mary in October 1929, coincidentally on the same day the stock market crash begins what we now call the Great Depression. Mary offers up the money they received from wedding gifts to help George keep the business solvent through the initial crisis. Mr. Potter, meanwhile, bought out the bank for pennies on the dollar. He would have taken over the Building And Loan as well, if it had not been for the charitable gestures of Mary and George, which forced them to give up a honeymoon trip.

Now let's stop here and try to figure out the politics of these characters. George Bailey and his father were Capitalists. They were almost certainly Republicans. But, Mr. Potter was also a Capitalist, and most likely a Republican as well. But there was a difference. Like the Progressives who were struggling at this time to regain political power, Mr. Potter was drunk with power. He sought to rule over people like royalty, or even as a dictator. This leads me to believe that Mr. Potter, the rich guy, was a Progressive at heart, even though he may have called himself a Republican.

Let's compare the moral values of these characters. George Bailey, the Conservative Republican, was obviously a religious man. His family celebrated Christmas and he believed in Heaven and angels, although he was reluctant to think an angel could actually visit him on Earth! He was a family man who loved his kids and cared deeply about his wife, family, and friends. He was very brave, jumping into freezing water TWICE, once to save his little brother, and again to save the angel Clarence, a total stranger at the time. He was a man who truly cared about the poor working folks. He dedicated his life to helping them, not by giving them handouts or government programs, but by helping them grow their own fortunes and raise their own standard of living. He was a charitable man, giving money to his friends who found themselves in desperate situations, and passing up one opportunity after another to stick around and help out his family and his community. In my mind, this is the description of today's Conservative Republicans, even though the Progressives have spent the past 100 years trying to paint them as evil, greedy, rich people.

Mr. Potter, the Progressive Republican, was really the evil rich guy. He could have returned the money Uncle Billy had misplaced, but he didn't do it. Instead, he used that incident to try to steal the Building And Loan business, and send George to prison in the process. He had tried to sucker George into coming to work for him, offering a $20,000 a year salary and a three year contract. At first, George was tempted. That was a lot more money than the $45 a week he'd been drawing from the Building And Loan. It meant an opportunity to finally travel the world, which was his life-long, unfulfilled desire. But George saw through the scam very quickly. Mr. Potter didn't care at all about the working poor. He called them "riff raff" and did everything he could to keep them in poverty and in debt - to him. Would Mr. Potter have jumped into freezing water to save anyone? Hardly.

Today's Progressives are much more like Mr. Potter than George Bailey. Every Conservative can clearly understand that. When George experienced what life would be like if he had never been born, Bedford Falls had been transformed into Pottersville, a city consumed by poverty and immorality where evil, greedy, rich people like Mr. Potter owned and controlled everything and everybody.

Look at any issue today and think about it in the context of Bedford Falls and Pottersville. In which of these towns would they have taught gay history in school? In which of these towns would drug abuse be more likely? Which of these towns would have the largest percentage of people on welfare and other government entitlement programs? Which of these towns would have been more likely to take down a cross from public land?

Don't let the Progressives get away with painting Conservatives as evil and greedy. They're the ones who are drunk with power. They're the ones who think nothing of keeping others down so they can enrich themselves.

It really is a wonderful life. But I can't help wondering what it would have been like if Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson had never been born.

Redistribution Redux

Envy is a powerful member of the class of deadly sins. Ever since the dawn of civilization, envy has had a profound effect on our society. Envy is the foundation of the classification of people based on the things they have. If you're in the upper class, you have stuff. If you're in the lower class, you have less stuff. This doesn't mean anything, except that this guy has more stuff than this other guy. It doesn't make either man superior. 

In fact, in any society, someone must have something more than someone else. If the world contained just two people, let's call them Adam and Eve, there would be an inequality of stuff all the time. Eve would pick a flower. Now she has a flower and Adam does not. She becomes the "upper class" when measured by the number of flowers you have. Feeling envy, Adam picks two flowers. This moves him from the "lower class" to the "upper class" and repositions Eve from the "upper class" to the "lower class." So what? What difference does it make who has more flowers? What if Adam doesn't even like flowers? What if he's allergic to them? The idea that Adam hates Eve because she has more flowers than him is absurd.

Let me try to keep this simple. Think of a family with two children. Mom works, but dad stays home and takes care of the kids. In this micro-society, mom is the "upper class" because she alone generates all the wealth. She uses that wealth to provide for her own needs, as well as the needs of her husband and children. The system works fine and nobody cares that mom generates more wealth than they do.

Along comes trouble. The kids are approached by a politician who convinces them that mom isn't sharing enough of her wealth with them. This is really easy to do. One of the kids asked for a new smartphone and mom said no. Is she being greedy, or just a good parent? The politician suggests that she's being greedy. The other kid remembers that she wanted a new pair of shoes and mom wouldn't buy them for her. It doesn't matter if mom had a good reason to deny these requests from her children. Maybe she knew that the family budget would not support these extra expenses. In order to protect her family, she decided to use that money to buy something more critically needed for the family. Or, she may have decided that it was more important in the long run for the family to have the security of a nest egg, instead of the short term pleasure of owning a new phone or some new shoes. But the politician wants to steal control of the kids away from mom. It's easy to do that if he can convince the kids that mom was being greedy. Once he has control of the mom, he can force her to buy these things for her kids.

There was, of course, another way. The kids could have taken part-time jobs to earn the money necessary to buy these things for themselves. Dad could have taken a job, with the kids pitching in to help by doing some of the chores for dad. They could have compromised with mom, maybe working out a budget together to save for the things they wanted and buy them later.  They could have accepted mom's decision and learned to live without the phone and the shoes.

If the politician gains control over the mom, he can take mom's money and use it to buy the phone and shoes. Following through on his promise to the kids, he's made them happy, and they'll continue to vote him into power over mom. At first, it looks like a system that benefits the majority -- two kids over one mom.

But there are unexpected consequences. By taking wealth from mom, the family has not gained any total wealth. In fact, if the politician took more money from mom than he needed to buy the phone and shoes, that redistribution of mom's wealth to the kids cost the family some money. If the kids, or dad, had taken a job instead, the family would have had a net gain in wealth instead. The family would have been better off. Even if they decided to live without the phone and shoes, they'd be better off.

Now the mom loses her job. She doesn't have a nest egg to help her family survive the short-term loss of income, so they end up losing their home. The kids are forced to sell the phone and shoes to buy food. The politician is responsible for this. Mom had a better plan to protect the family. But the politician didn't care about protecting the family. He didn't care about mom's plan. He only cared about getting power over the family. He bought votes from the kids using their own envy as a tool.

Here's something really evil to consider. Suppose the politician owned the store where the kids bought the phone and shoes?  Now the politician has redistributed wealth from the family to himself. If you think that can't happen, think again.

This same logic works as well with a country of 300 million people as it does with a family of four. It works just as well with an entire planet of several billion people. Taking wealth from some people to give to others else doesn't generate new wealth. 

The desire of people to have more stuff is supposed to motivate them to create their own wealth.

 If the stuff they want is "redistributed" to them by government, there's no need for them to create their own wealth. The family suffers. The citizens of the country suffer. The people of the world suffer. 

Redistribution of wealth is evil. It only looks like a good idea if you allow envy to distort your perception of reality. What it really does is give someone power over you and your family. When they take away your power, you lose your freedom. Trading your freedom for a smartphone and some shoes is not a fair trade. You're better off being free to create your own wealth. 

Tell the politician to take a hike. He's not interested in helping you. He's only interested in helping himself. Tell him that you don't hate your mom because she didn't buy you some stuff. You love her for protecting her family, and you want to be free to do the same thing for your family one day. 

Occupy Tea Party

One thing that's puzzled me about Occupy Wall Street is how quickly it spread to well over a hundred cities. Even using social media (Twitter) to organize into groups, the crowds seemed to spring up much faster than you'd expect for a truly "grass roots" movement.

Another thing that had me scratching my head was the incoherent messages from individual members of these groups. If they all assembled together to protest something, wouldn't you expect everyone in the crowd to be angry about the same thing? YouTube is full of interviews with Occupy protesters who don't seem to have a clue what's going on! How is that possible?

Then came the bums. Homeless people from all over town were assimilated into the Occupy crowds. With them came drug addicts, drug dealers, street gangsters, and the like. Why did the Occupy protesters allow their movement to be polluted like that? Didn't they realize that those people would dilute their message by packing the crowd with people who were there for a completely different purpose? 

Ironically, the drug dealers thrive on capitalism, the very thing many of the Occupy protesters claim to despise!

Why did the union leaders quickly express support for the Occupy movement? How does corporate cronyism hurt union employees more than any other citizens? It seems to me that we have a President who supports the unions and who has been funneling taxpayer dollars into make-work union jobs at a record pace. These people should have no bone to pick with Wall Street or the President at the moment. After all, much of the money they take home to feed their families came through the very same banks and corporations they're protesting.

It's fairly obvious that these crowds were assembled and organized by someone with an agenda. They didn't really care that much about what the protest was about, either. They simply wanted bodies in the streets. They wanted media attention. They actually counted on the filth, violence, and anger. They wanted the crowds to be seen by all Americans, and eventually despised. But why? What purpose can that possibly serve anyone?

It didn't make any sense at first. But then it him me, like a bright light suddenly appeared and exposed the truth from within the shadows of mystery and confusion. These crowds were intended as surrogates. They were assembled to create negative impressions that could be transferred to another group - namely, the Tea Party.

Progressives fear the Tea Party. Despite their efforts to marginalize them, keep them out of the media, and paint them as racist bigot homophobe lunatics, they had no evidence to support those claims. They needed to incite the Tea Party, to make them angry enough to become violent. That would give the media ample footage to demonstrate to all Americans that the Tea Party was nothing more than a bunch of crazy people way out on the fringe of the right-wing. That would let them scare people into ignoring their message. Call them Nazi's and nobody will pay any attention to them anymore.

It didn't happen.  

The Tea Party eventually assembled in clean, well-behaved, and peaceful gatherings and meetings. They didn't cultivate anger and hostility. In fact, they represented just the opposite. They were concerned citizens who shared a common goal, determined to work together peacefully to spread their message and encourage change. 

The Progressives were not happy about this at all. If the "under-informed masses" who are the "swing voters" in America learned who these Tea Party people were and heard their message, it could signal the beginning of the end of years of Progressive infiltration into American politics. The 2010 elections proved that the worst fears of the Progressives were coming to pass. The next big election in 2012, the one that would give America another four years of the most Progressive President this country has ever known, might be lost to the Republicans. Worse yet, it might be lost to a Tea Party candidate. What the Tea Party stood for was poison for the Progressive movement. Something had to be done to stop them.

Enter the Occupy crowd. The Progressive machine went into action, filling the streets with their Useful Idiot armies. These were mainly union thugs who would do anything their union leaders asked, thinking they were somehow fighting to keep evil management from taking away their jobs, benefits, and pensions. They threw in college students, indoctrinated and thoroughly confused by their Progressive professors into embracing Marx, Che and Keynes, and fired up with class envy and anger toward the evil rich.  They knew that gathering these people in a public place would attract some unsavory characters. That's what they wanted. They wanted a crowd of angry protesters, modern-day hippies, drug addicts, confused idiots, dangerous criminals, and any other disgusting vermin these crowds would attract.

Then the media, either willingly or unwittingly, swooped in for the kill. At first they could portray the Occupy crowds as generally peaceful young citizens who were, in many ways, angry about issues that were very "similar" to Tea Party concerns. They established a common concern, big government and political corruption through corporate cronyism. The Progressives had managed to stage their own "Tea Party" movement, and they fully expected it to get completely out of control. That's what they wanted to happen. 

It did.

Eventually, the Occupy movement's media exposure focused on the negatives. They filmed anger, class hatred, racism, bigotry, violence, and vulgar filth. Then came the police. Scenes of crowds being dispersed with tear gas and bean bag guns were shown over and over on American television, and around the world as well. It was Breaking News everywhere. Even the under-informed paid attention.

The Tea Party generally dismissed the Occupy movement as yet another example of America being infested by Progressives and a Federal government that's ever increasing in size and power. It galvanized them and helped convince them they were on the right track.

But what about the under-informed Americans? These are the people who don't pay close attention to politics. They're nearly consumed with their family, their jobs, their friends and community. They only consume news in little bites, just enough to stay current, or so they think. They're easily manipulated by the media. Many of them believe that political comedy and satire are always inspired by the truth. They think that a comedian wouldn't tell a joke about a politician or a political party or movement unless it had at least some basis in fact. The audience certainly would not laugh at a joke that was nothing more than a complete fabrication offered only as a vicious attack on innocent victims. That's not funny, after all. But, when the audience laughs, everybody can relax. No matter how mean-spirited a joke sounds, the victim somehow deserved the barbs.

They open their New York Times and scan through the pages looking for quick bits of information. They may turn on the television news channel and play it in the background while getting dressed in the morning. They give it their divided attention. The human interest stories grab their attention. The stuff in between makes an impression, but it's mostly subconscious. 

When the television news channel tells them something is really important, they believe it must be really important. Someone of "authority" took the time to bring this matter to their attention. Whatever that person tells them must have at least some degree of accuracy. If it's violent and ugly, it will leave a negative impression on them, even if that impression is only subconscious.

When the Occupy crowd and the Tea Party are "merged" into a single entity in the minds of these under-informed Americans, the result only benefits the Progressive movement. They've now managed to leave the impression that "crowds" of "protesters" are being dispersed with tear gas, defecating in the streets, raping each other, stealing from each other, interfering with small businesses, and generally causing chaos. They're painted as evil. The Tea Party is made up of "protesters" too, so they must be evil as well.

The Progressives hope that the "evil" paint will spill over onto the Tea Party, leaving the impressing that ANY protesters are simply the lunatic fringe of society. They can ALL be safely ignored. The police will take care of it. We can all relax.

Is the Tea Party message being drowned out by the noise and confusion of the Occupy movement? Think about it. What do you think?

The Earth Will Die

We call her Mother Earth because she gives all of us life. But, like any good mother, it's very easy for us to take her for granted. She won't always be around to protect us. She will die one day, and we will all die along with her. Well, actually not "we" who are alive today, but the people who swarm over her at the time of her death; who are less significant than fleas on the back of a dog.

Politicians who use scare tactics to trick people into supporting more taxes and government control are despicable. Those who accuse us of contributing to the death of our planet are not just despicable, they're also very wrong. Global Warming, now called Global Climate Change because the Earth isn't really getting warmer, is junk science. It's a combination of lying with statistics, logical fallacies, and plain old-fashioned lies. Why would anyone do this? Simple. To get your money.

Even if you fall for the crap, and trade money for peace of mind, nothing will happen, except that you'll help make some politicians and their cronies a lot richer. 

If you were selling chocolate fudge, and you were also in charge of the world, wouldn't it be in your best interests, financially, to convince everyone that chocolate fudge made you live longer and healthier lives? If you could, you'd pass a law making it mandatory for everyone to buy chocolate fudge. Those who refused to buy your chocolate fudge would have to pay a hefty fine, so they might as well eat your fudge. Of course, you'd also want to seize control of the manufacturing of chocolate fudge all over the world. Just to make it less obvious, you'd want some of your closest friends and "supporters" actually running the chocolate fudge factories. That would divert suspicion from you so the people wouldn't see how (and why) the trick was performed. Your friends could quietly pass some of the proceeds back to you later. After all, there'd be plenty of dough to spread around.

The irony of all this is that the Earth really will die one day. It could happen when the Sun grows old and expands beyond the orbit of our planet. The Earth will first burn to a crisp, then become vaporized as temperatures rise into the millions of degrees. Now THAT's Global Warming!  

It could happen the same way we suspect life on Mars ended. The molten iron that surrounds the Earth's solid iron core is cooling. Over time, that molten iron will solidify. When that happens, the Earth's magnetic fields will shut down. Those magnetic fields are like the shields on Star Trek. They protect the Earth from deadly radiation that's constantly pouring off of the Sun. With our shields down, the Earth's water and atmosphere cannot survive, and without those things, we can't survive either.

It could happen sooner, too. There's all kinds of junk flying around in space. Thanks to gravity, our Sun and planet Earth itself are giant vacuum cleaners. The Earth is in orbit around the Sun only because of its forward momentum. It's actually falling into the Sun at a constant speed. Our momentum causes centrifugal force which perfectly balances out the force of the Sun's gravity. But what happens when a giant lump of rock wanders into our solar system? Once it gets close enough to the Sun, it will be pulled in toward the center. If we're lucky, these rocks will miss us. They'll swing around in a huge elliptical orbit and come around again in thousands of years. This happens all the time. We call them comets. But what happens when one of these comets happens to pass too close to the Earth? If even a very small comet slammed into the Earth it would immediately kill every living thing on the planet. A large enough object could blow the planet apart, turning us into another asteroid belt.

I won't even get into the other ways we might all die, like global thermonuclear war, an epidemic of an incurable disease, genetic mutation, alien attack, and so on. 

My point is that none of these things can be prevented by mankind. Our world is going to die one day. Odds are, we'll know it's coming, and there won't be a damn thing we can do about it.

Even if the Earth is getting warmer, and even if that warming is somehow caused by mankind, we're far more likely to die from one of these other causes before we could possibly commit suicide.

So the next time a politician, or a professor, or some other person of "authority" tries to frighten you into thinking that the sky is falling, pay close attention to the "cure" they're proposing. If it involves stealing your money or your freedom, there's a very good chance you're being conned.

The Lemonade Link

Many children in America first tasted Capitalism by giving others a taste of lemonade. As a kid, I raided my mother's cupboard, fetched some Kool Aid and a bag of sugar, whipped up a pitcher of the stuff, grabbed a pile of paper cups, and set up a store in my front yard. I made a sign from a piece of cardboard and a magic marker. I wanted to raise money for something, I don't recall what, so I set my price based on the cost of buying that thing.

Let's say the toy I wanted cost $100 and a pitcher of Kool Aid yields twenty servings in tiny paper cups. If I sell my Kool Aid at $5 per cup, I'll end up with the hundred bucks. I can close up shop, take the bus to the store, buy the toy, and live happily ever after. Right? Uh, nope.

Nobody would buy my Kool Aid for $5 per cup. That's too much to pay, even for some adult passing by who thinks my little venture into entrepreneurialism merited encouragement. After my ice started to melt, and a few people told me my price was way too high, I'd change my strategy. I could ask someone how much they'd be willing to pay for a nice, cold, refreshing cup of tasty Kool Aid. Let's say they tell me they'd happily pay 25 cents. No problem! I'll sell them for 25 cents a cup and make only $5 for the pitcher. I can always make 19 more pitchers, sell them all, and end up with my hundred bucks. Right? Uh, nope.

When I run out of Kool Aid and sugar, mom tells me I have to buy some more. I can't run my Kool Aid business at her expense. So I learn the first lesson in Business 101: Stuff you sell costs money to make. I give mom my $5 and ask her to buy more Kool Aid, sugar and cups. She does, and I make another pitcher. Great! At this pace I'll have my toy in my hands in no time! Right? Uh, nope.

Because it costs me $5 to make $5, my profit margin is zero. I can make and sell Kool Aid at that rate forever and I'll never get ahead. I may have a zillion happy customers, but I'll be working for nothing. No problem. I'll raise my price to 30 cents. Maybe fewer people will buy at that price, but at least I'll make a nickel a cup in profit. My total earnings will be $1 per pitcher, after expenses. I'm on my way to getting that toy now! Right? Uh, nope.

I get a bunch of my friends together and hire them all to run Kool Aid stands all over the neighborhood. Since I make a buck a day from my stand, twenty stands should make me $20 a day. Heck, I'll get my toy in less than a week now! Right? Uh, nope.

You see, I was working for free. My labor costs were zero. As sole owner of my corporation, I was taking the $1 profit out in the form of a dividend. You could also call it wages. My friends don't get anything in return from investing a day in their life selling Kool Aid for me. If they demand $1 a day in wages, my profit from each of their stands would be zero. Therefore, there's no point in expanding. It's not profitable. Besides, I might flood the market with Kool Aid, making it much harder to sell. The "Supply" of Kool Aid would now exceed the "Demand," to put that in business terms. I'll just have to work for 99 more weeks before I can buy my toy. Right? Uh, nope.

Let's say it takes me all day to sell one pitcher of Kool Aid. But, over the course of the day the ice melts and I have to waste the last five cups. I would have made $6 selling 20 cups at 30 cents each. But selling only 15 cups leaves me with only $4.50. Instead of making a dollar profit, I've lost 50 cents. The next day, I'll just raise my price to 50 cents a cup. That should do the trick. Right? Uh, nope.

When I get out there and open my stand the next day, people who used to buy my Kool Aid just keep walking. They glance over, see the new price, grumble something about "ripoff" and then walk across the street to a little girl who has just started selling Lemonade for 30 cents a cup! I've got to go back to the 30 cent price. I can't compete with that girl if I don't. I don't know how she does it, but she MUST be making a profit at that price. I just KNOW it! Right? Uh, nope.

I ask my dad for help. He says he'll go find out how my competitor is able to make a profit. In business we call this intelligence, market research, competitive analysis, maybe even espionage. My dad learns that my competitor's parents have been subsidizing her little business venture. They're "helping her learn business" by making her pay only HALF the cost of the materials and GIVING her the rest. Little do they know, they're not actually helping her. In the real world, nobody gives you anything for free. Well, unless you're a "green energy" company and the guy you supported became President and handed you some taxpayer money. But I digress. My dad won't help me, even though he could, because he doesn't think that would teach me how business really works. I hate him for it now, but I'll thank him later. But all I have to do is stick to the original plan, except to make sure I sell all 20 cups in every pitcher. I'll make my $1 profit every day, plus I'll come away from the experience with a more realistic view of how business really works. All is good. Right? Uh, nope.

At the rate of $1 per day profit, it will take 100 days to earn the money to buy that toy I want. Well before that happens, Winter will come and it'll be too cold to sell Kool Aid. The best I can hope for is that my parents will get me that toy I want for Christmas. Maybe if I bribe them with the $40 profit I made during the summer? Perhaps.

Now lets break this down from a purely business perspective:

The Kool Aid and sugar are my raw materials. They cost $5 per pitcher.

The $6 I get from selling each pitcher are my gross receipts.

Costs:

Materials = $5

Total operating costs = $5

Income:

Inventory = 20 cups of Kool Aid

Unit price = 30 cents

Total gross receipts = $6

Profit = Income minus Costs = $6 - $5 = $1

The profit is paid to the only shareholder, me, as a dividend.

Now imagine that the Kool Aid stand is Apple Computers. They make something called an iPhone and sell them for $500 each. Of course, they have a LOT more things going into the "Costs" side of the balance sheet. But, essentially, the principles are the same. This is hypothetical, because I don't have access to Apple's financial records, but:

Costs: 

Materials = $550,000,000

Research & Development = $35,000,000

Legal expenses = $10,000,000

Marketing = $50,000,000

Labor = $800,000,000

Shipping and Distribution = $250,000,000

Taxes and fees = $100,000,000

Total operating costs = $1,800,000,000

Income

Inventory = 5,000,000

Unit price = $500

Total gross receipts = $2,500,000,000.

Wow, Apple is rich! They make $2.5 BILLION dollars a year from this one product! Uh, nope.

Profit = Income minus Costs = $2.5B minus $1.8B = $700,000,000

Still, that's a LOT of money. If they had 70,000,000 shareholders, each one would get a $10 dividend for this one profitable product.

Again, I have absolutely no links to support these numbers. They're completely made up and probably WAY WAY off.  I wasn't trying to analyze Apple Computers. I set out to prove another point.

Let's say that Apple pays $800,000,000 to Chinese workers who each make about $2,000 a year. Let's say that American workers doing the same job would cost $30,000 a year to do the same job. That means that the American workers make about 15 times what the American workers make. Good for them, right? Uh, nope.

If Apple made those iPhones here, their labor would cost 15 times as much, or a whopping $12,000,000,000. That would raise their total operating costs to $13,000,000,000. If they kept the prices the same, they would lose money. In fact, that would turn a $700M profit into a $10.5B loss! In order for Apple to break even, making NO profit at all, they'd have to sell each iPhone for $2600. Just like my 50 cent Kool Aid, most people would just walk on by mumbling something about 'ripoff' as they passed without buying. That's the end of the story, right? If Apple didn't outsource their labor, there would be no iPhones at all, right? Uh, nope.

You see, some other company, either in America (think Google or Microsoft), or in some other country, WOULD make the iPhone, and they WOULD outsource, and they WOULD sell their equal quality phones for $500 each. Apple would no longer exist, but someone else would take their place.

What's the solution to this nightmare? Certainly American workers cannot feed their families on a $1500 a year wage! We certainly can't afford $2600 iPhones!

I think I know the solution, but I'll save that for the next post.  In the meantime, I hope somebody tries to dispute my math. Plug in the real numbers, if you can. See if you can show me where I'm wrong. I'm willing to learn! When you realize that I'm right, see if you can come up with some actual solutions to this problem. We'll see how close we come to the same conclusion.

The Abortion Solution

Some people didn't get that my last post (Green Government) was a parody. Actually, it was an attempt to demonstrate how anyone can lie with statistics using a logical fallacy. When you see a magician make a quarter disappear right before your very eyes, you have at least three choices. You might assume it was a trick and wonder how it was done. Or, you can believe the quarter actually disappeared. Or, you can be a magician yourself who knows how the trick is done and simply admire the magician's skill. Almost everyone who sees this trick for the first time believes, at first, that the quarter disappeared. What makes this trick so entertaining is that you don't know how the trick was done.

Your brain, which is forever trying to make sense of the world by filtering you senses through your memories and experiences, is momentarily confused. The magician used a technique called "misdirection" to distract you, basically tricking your brain to pay attention to the wrong thing.

People use the same trick in politics to convince you that something is true when it's not. Like the magician, these people are tricking you on purpose and they're often very skilled. If you're not extremely careful, you might think the quarter really did disappear. When watching a politician, or a magician for that matter, you should question everything you see or hear because it just might be a trick.

But I didn't intend to write about magicians or misdirection today. Today's post is serious. It's about abortion, a controversial issue that most people don't really understand.

Some of my friends tell me the issue has been settled by a Supreme Court case, Roe v Wade, which made abortion legal back in January 1973. The case wasn't even close, they tell me. It was 7-2 in favor of legal abortion.

Some of my friends tell me the court got it wrong. Abortion is the murder of an unborn human child. Since killing is more wrong than denying someone their right to privacy, abortion should be illegal.

Actually, Roe v Wade does suggest that some abortions are murder. The tipping point is something called viability, which is where the art of misdirection can be applied. At what point does mommy's egg and daddy's sperm turn into a human being who is CAPABLE of continued life outside of mommy's tummy?  (By the way, I defy the gay marriage supporters to prove that a baby can be made by anything other than one man and one woman. But that's another blog post, I guess.)

Most of my friends don't know this, but Jane Roe was a fake name, like John Doe. The real person involved was a redhead named Norma Leah McCorvey, and her life story is pretty tragic. She was born in 1947 in Louisiana and moved to Houston at a very early age and raised as a Jehovah's Witness. Her father took off when she was too young to know what was going on. Her mom, Mildred Nelson, was a violent drunk. But wait, it gets worse.

Norma dropped out of school when she was 14. Despite the fact that she was sexually attracted to other women, she married a guy named Woody McCorvey when she was 16. She got pregnant two years later and decided to split up with Woody. She gave birth to her daughter Melissa.

Apparently, she was still sexually active, maybe even with Woody, and got pregnant again. She gave birth to another daughter, Paige, and gave that child up for adoption. Then Norma moved back in with her mother. When Norma told her mother she was gay, Her mother disowned Norma and kicked her out of the house, taking custody of her granddaughter Melissa.

Norma went to live with her father and took some low paying jobs to support herself. Apparently, she wasn't as gay as she thought, since she managed to get pregnant a third time in 1969. Unemployed and depressed, her friends advised her to move to Dallas and claim she was raped. Under Texas law at the time, you could get a legal abortion if you got pregnant after being raped. There was just one little problem with Norma's plan. She couldn't prove she was raped. There was no police documentation or evidence, so her appeal for an abortion was denied.

She tried to get an illegal abortion, but the clinics she'd planned to use were shut down by the authorities. She ended up being referred to a couple of lawyers named Linda Coffee and Sarah Weddington. According to Norma, these were activist lawyers who were searching for a case they could use to overturn the anti-abortion laws. It took three years, but they finally managed to get the case up to the Federal Supreme Court where they prevailed by a 7-2 decision. During the proceedings, Norma gave birth to her third daughter, Mariah, who was also given up for adoption.

Many of my friends see Norma (who they call Roe) as the Rosa Parks of the pro-choice movement. Actually, the story is much more complicated than they think. Norma was confronted by a pro-life activist minister named Philip "Flip" Benham. It made her think about what she'd done, and it made her confused and depressed.

She stayed in Dallas living with Connie Gonzales for many years. She became a pro-life activist. She fell into deep depression and ended up abusing drugs and even trying to commit suicide. At one point, Jesus took the wheel and Norma's life got turned around. Norma ended up getting baptized in a swimming pool on television.

Norma published her autobiography, I Am Roe, in 1994. She published her second book called Won By Love in 1998. She was received into the Catholic church. She announced that she was no longer a lesbian.

Did you know any of this? You should read her books! Not shocked enough yet? Let me continue.

In 2005, Norma asked the Supreme Court to review Roe v Wade in a case called McCorvey v Hill. She wanted to present new evidence to prove that abortion harms women. Her petition was denied.

Norma has now endorsed Republican Ron Paul in his race to become president in 2012, saying, "I support Ron Paul for President because we share the same goal, that of overturning Roe v Wade. He has never wavered on the issue of being pro-life and has a voting record to prove it. He understands the importance of civil liberties for all, including the unborn."

Norma participated in a pro-life demonstration at the University of Notre Dame on May 17, 2009 before President Barack Obama was scheduled to deliver a commencement address to the graduating class. His invitation to speak at this Catholic school raised a lot of controversy, given his pro-abortion stance.

Norma got arrested on the first day of confirmation hearings for Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor after she joined another protester who was yelling at Senator Al Franken during his opening address.

You'll even get a chance to see Norma in a movie called Doonby that is scheduled for release this month. It's been called It's A Wonderful Life without the Wonderful part. I intend to see it.

When I explain all this to my pro-choice friends, many of them are shocked to learn that Roe never actually had an abortion. I'm always surprised by the number of people I meet who don't know the story behind Roe v Wade.

But I wanted to talk about viability. That, I believe, is the key ingredient in the controversy. The exact date when a fertilized egg turns into a person cannot be determined. The fact is, this is different for every fertilized egg. Based on observations and such, it was determined that a baby becomes viable an AVERAGE of seven months into the pregnancy.

But this is just an average. A baby has a 50% chance of survival, on average, after only 24 weeks.

My pro-life friends tell me that this doesn't matter. Only God can make a baby, and it is a living thing right from the start. Science has done some amazing things. We can fertilize an egg in a test tube, but it has to be planted back inside a mom in order to grow into a baby. We cannot create a human being from just an egg and a sperm, at least not yet.

So the question becomes, is it murder to kill ANY living thing, or only a human being?

Personally, I'm in favor of abortion, provided the unborn child waives his or her right to live. Seriously, since you can't know for sure when viability occurs, any abortion can result in the death of a viable human being. That would be murder, and that would be illegal despite Roe v Wade. If you know with absolute certainty that the fertilized egg has not become a viable human being yet, then abortion would simply be the termination of a non-human life, albeit a life that most likely would have become a viable human being at some point if not aborted.

You can't have it both ways, by the way. When someone murders a woman who is found to be pregnant, her attacker is usually charged with two murders, one for the mother and one for her unborn child. If killing her resulted in the death of two human beings, and these cases have been won and have, therefore, set precedents, then ANY fertilized egg must be considered viable. Again, since we don't know for sure when viability occurs, we are left to assume that this particular mother, this victim of a horrible crime, would not have aborted her child and would, therefore, have given birth to a brand new human being. The murder did take two lives. One was certainly a human being, while the other may have been, but almost certainly would have been. Still with me?

I'm easily surprised these days, I guess. But I'm still amazed at the number of people who think Roe v Wade was all about preventing kids from being raised by parents who can't take care of them. It had nothing to do with that, even though from what you now know about Norma, her baby would probably have been in that category, at least for awhile. In fact, Norma admits it. Norma now has a good relationship with her daughter Melissa, who has blessed her with two granddaughters.

Norma McCorvey

I hope Norma, her daughters Melissa, Paige, and Mariah, and all their children, get together one day in  Heaven. I'm sure they'll have a lot to talk about, and an eternity to do it.

References:

Robin Acton - Pittsburgh Tribune-Review 01-20-2008

Cornell University Syllabus - Roe v Wade Supreme Court Case

Roe v Wade - Wikipedia Article

Norma L. McCorvey Wikipedia Article

Flip Benham Wikipedia Article

Operation Save America Wikipedia Article

Operation Save America Published Statement

Purchase I Am Roe by Norma McCorvey on Amazon.com

Purchase Won By Love by Norma McCorvey on Amazon.com