The News Blast for 10/2

Second newsblast: news you can use!

1. Lib rally crowd estimated at "175,000 to 200,000" by...lib media. Capitol Police have issued no official estimate (big surprise...).

Check the pictures:

'One Nation [Forcefully Divided by Race, Income, and Employment status] Working Together' liberal rally:

Remember, this is 175,000 to 200,000.

"Restoring Honor [And God] in America" Glenn Beck Rally, cited at 60,000 to 70,000 and 87,000 by liberal media:

Both are pictures at the 'peak' of the gathering (I couldn't find aerials of the liberals as they're probably embarrassed at the turnout)

Now let's compare them:

Red = ONR dense crowd (people pushing themselves together), Blue = ONR Loose crowd (noticeable space between between people)

Notice how the crowd tapers off and people are moving toward the 'dense' area in the ONR picture above.

So, if we accept the lib media estimates of crowd size, did the Glenn Beck rally (which dense entirely around reflecting pool, under all the trees, the WWII memorial, and the side field; while loose only behind the WWII memorial and in a small portion of the side field.

2. Political gridlock as the economy drifts - if you think this is bad, wait until Republicans take over. Obama doesn't have the experience to play the political game, and the most effective Chief of Staff in the last two decades left on Friday. Obama's screwed.

The News Blast for 10/1

First of a new pattern for the blog: quick news commentary.

I hope you'll make the Newsblast part of your routine to keep yourself informed!

1. Rasmussen: All-Time Low of 34.6% Now Call Themselves Democrats - Public polling started about 1946 and, in that time, Democrat party identification has never dipped so low.

Why is this important?

Because Democrats largely depend on a very, very old system of party loyalty/individual benefit, more so at the 'elite' level than at the base. If more people are turning away from the party right after they pushed through the best kickback bill possible (the porkulus), it's evidence that their party's model is falling apart. Virg Bernero's absolutely dismal poll numbers are also evidence of this.

2. Bank of America Asks Patience As Stockholders Stew Over Slump The slump is the result of Obama's new financial controls. This has caused BoA to shed jobs and begin putting remaining employees on VHA health insurance (the institution you'll be hearing about a lot more next year: it's the Obamacare 'network,' but I prefer 'commune' or 'collective').

Why is this important?

Bank of America is very big and very public: this makes it very good to watch for an idea about the state of the financial sector. The fact that their stockholders seem to be selling, and that they're dumping property traders, tells me the Obama financial control bill is doing as Republicans predicted: further killing the housing market.

3. CNN Fires Rick Sanchez for "Jews" Remarks The crazies are cracking and it's like popcorn out there! This is the same Rick Sanchez that said Obama was as "captivating" to the rest of the world as he is to us at home. State media, sheesh...

Why is this important?

Because it's funny, helps us and keeps our spirits up :)

Thus we conclude the random Newsblast of the day - if you have suggestions, please leave them in the comment box. I do plan on doing more main articles with fewer articles tagged on, but let me know!

The Solutions Revolution

Bureaucrat: Man or Machine?

Man has dignity and this dignity deserves respect.

To treat someone as a means denies this respect and is evil: people should be treated as ends.

A human being is not a piece of equipment, yet the good bureaucrat is nothing more than that.

Politicians write a line in a bill among some 4,000 pages which describes the total functions of one person over their entire professional lifetime.

In government, people become mere means to reach policy goals.

Thus is the conflict for the vast majority of bureaucrats:

• to carry out the letter of the law and do their job well while becoming a replaceable automaton,
• or to have individuality and damage their part of the system.

Truly, a man cannot serve two masters.

The crisis of this choice is the reason for the higher rate of depression among public employees around the developed world.

(Empirical: In France and the Low Countries, suicide rates among public employees is much higher than the private sector (France's total population suicide rate is 14.7% while among public employees it is 15.3%). In Canada, depression and mental health issues account for 45% of disability claims in the government. In Japan, a country with (with 1/3 the US's population) 90-100 suicides PER DAY, news reports are plagued with pressured government officials killing themselves. In the US, however, the formula is different: our government officials (according to the DHHS) are more depressed than the general population, but kill themselves at about the same rate.)

It is both bad economic policy and morally wrong to put an intelligent, responsible person in a situation where doing a good job and having personhood are incompatible.

Government employees suffer from the delusion of efficacy and individuality supported by high wages, public unions, and encouragement from their co-workers: they will oppose cuts.

No matter their conditions, however, who someone is is more important than what they have.

We have it in our power to literally rescue them from a system which denies their rightful dignity.

It is the same kind of tough love we practice with drug addicts.

Cuts, like rehab, will not be liked by bureaucrats, but must be done both for their moral benefit and for the good of our civilization.

Government and the Middle Class

Almost every government program benefits the Middle Class at the expense of the very rich and the very poor.

We live in a democratic republic. Authority and legislative agendas is inevitably derived from popular will and support.

The focus of our political system is on the wishes of the Middle Class. For instance, the email that sparked this post was from Michelle Malkin and Eric Son of Eric: "Stop New Tax on the Middle Class!"

Depending on which politically expedient source you use, the Middle Class makes up between 25-66% of the American public.

In my limited opinion, our politics and their governmental outcomes suggest 55-70%.

Being that this is such a huge voting block, politicians are inevitably going to respond to large movements within it.

Typically our government structure seeks to "serve" the Middle Class while, at the same time, keep it struggling.

Why? Because this serves the political elite's interests best: it keeps them elected.

Why the MC struggles:

MC families usually invest solely in a home and give us the phrase 'house poor' to signify the many MC couples live a lower standard of living with the faith that their sacrifice to pay for a too-expensive house will pay off.

Since 2005, this hasnt happened, thus MC families struggle.

Cash for Clunkers is, perhaps, the best example of helping the MC at the expense of the very rich and very poor.

The program was designed to get old cars out of the market and make new cars cheaper to people who'd been owning older cars.

Putting aside that each car taken in the program cost taxpayers $24,000, the effects were simple: the top 1% of income earners primarily paid for it while fewer old cars raised the price of used cars for the rest of the year.

Who did that hurt? While the hurt to the rich and upper MC is very direct, the reduced supply and corresponding jump in prices of low-end cars catastrophically damaged the social mobility (ability to rise into the MC) of the poor.

If you cant afford a car at all, you cant get to a job. If you cant get to your job, you cant make money and you dont get on-the-job training. If you dont get those, you fall behind in the market and join the perpetual underclass, dependent on others and the state.

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Explanation of the Wave

Quick Overview of how Liberal Economics Fail

Libs use public spending to stimulate the creation of investment capital. The result is a whole bunch of money in investment firms (and a HUGE capacity for making war) but a bunch of unemployment (very good for making war).

Their economic model was designed for the 1930's...where more production overwhelmingly meant more employees (it didnt work then - 19% unemployment in 1939 after 7 years of this system).

In the Information Age, more investment capital means better technology/training for maximizing the production of those employees you already have.

Libs will attempt to remedy the problem with more govt spending to train the adults left behind by the Wall Street rallies.

The first problem is the govt spending that destroyed the natural balance between technological advancement and the education of the worker. The training-based govt spending destroys entrepreneurial initiative because those trained dont know how to create systems, just operate in them.

Libs, then, make the govt create systems...which work as well as the Post Office. For example, health care.

Health employment's knowledge base is collapsing very quickly. If you learned the cutting edge in 1995, and didnt go back to school, think of how far you are behind in 2010. The AMA, then, doesnt encourage doctors to change...it just lobbies the government to subsidize the failing system.

This also works for war: the New Deal generated and then taxed to death a huge amount of investment capital...they, then, used this combined with the need for work of millions of young men and women...to go to WWII. Hitler's plan was the same.

These are the failures of any artificially planned economy and the reason why many of us are limited to part time work or unemployment checks.

ProLife Profile

I've decided to launch a new initiative with verifying candidates pro-life positions with a stamp on their website. These Prolife Profiles aim to give 3rd party verification for pro-life claims. I believe this is necessary given the increasingly life-supporting tendencies of the electorate and, thus, candidates' talk. To the right is the logo with all its factors and below is a description of each.

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"Conservababble's Prolife Profile"

Each gold star is full support while silver stars are partial or weak support for the life position.

*Top 3 are the trimesters of abortion. 3 gold stars in those positions means full and dependable opposition to each. For instance, George W. Bush would get 3 gold stars while Barack Obama would get a silver star for the 3rd and a skull and crossbones in each of the first two.

*The bottom star on the left regards euthanasia.

*The bottom-right star is the death penalty. A gold star means opposition in all cases while a silver star is opposition in most or in all but the most extreme cases.

*The "heart plus+" symbol to the right of the text signifies the proactive-change orientation of the candidate. There is a HUGE different between merely "defending" life and "promoting" pro-life positions. George W. Bush would not have gotten this symbol: his party had control of the Presidency, Congress, and the Supreme Court for 6 years and accomplished little in regards to promoting pro-life positions.

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I hope the logo has been helpful to you and please note that candidates/candidate staffs have to contact me and be vetted by me or vouched for by someone whose judgment I trust in order to legitimately use this endorsement.

Please share this with campaigns you know of: it's not effective if it's not used!

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Herb-Derived Medicines: Marijuana and Opium.

My reaction to anything people say is to read history. For medical pot, I look to China in the early to mid-19th century. When the British came a-knockin' with Indian Opium in 1792, the Chinese Emporer was all "aiite, sounds good...it's a medicine and all." By 1826, the fabric of urban Chinese society was entirely destroyed. In 1838, the Emperor appointed Lin Zexu to go to Canton and demolish the opium trade. In 1839, the British sent troops to enforce the opium trade's existence - they went to war with China over opium (known as the "Opium War" lol). The medicinal effects were entirely overlooked and a lot of suffering happened because of it.

Psychoactive drugs destroy societies

What happened to "medical opium?" By the 1860's, scientists had taken plant-based opium (poppies) and made a mass-producable drug: morphine. From morphine we have oxycodone, common codeine (which is in Tylenol/Excedrine today), and thousands of other drugs: all much safer with fewer side effects, less addictive capacity, and more targeted results than.........smoking a plant.

Marijuana is not a wonderdrug. It's a plant. The medicinal properties of it can be isolated and made into a painkiller: we dont need to be getting cancer patients stoned to get rid of their headaches. Just as opium has bred a bunch of commonly used, excellent drugs, cannibis can breed "canniboids." Dronabinol already exists (known as 'Marinol') and is, like morphine, a very crude drug. Instead of investing so many millions in the regulation of medical pot, why not have drug companies make drugs out of it? It's, you know, what they do.

After all, we live in the modern world: we dont rip up grass and light it on fire to get rid of minor aches and pains.

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Christian Candidacy

As I prepare to campaign, I've been thinking about what a Christian campaign looks like. This is something we all need to be thinking about, especially with a primary on August 3rd. Now, with the indirect help of Overisel Reformed's stellar Pastor Scott Lokers, I've reached some conclusions I'd like to share with you.

Before beginning, I have to clear a few things up. To those of you concerned about the "separation of church and state" (especially the one or two violent secular fanatics who read this): we do have a separation of our churches and our governments, yes, but no such separation exists between faith and politics. Second, conflict between Christians is not necessarily non-Christian. Fighting becomes non-Christian when it is not done constructively and not done virtuous, God-glorifying solutions.

In the electoral pursuit of these solutions, Christian Candidates (CCs) must have the intellectual humility to accept that our democracy and our God use conflict to find better ideas for the People (Eph 4: 15-16). It is through popular sovereignty that we see our Sovereign (Col 2:18-19). Therefore, a CC must have the humility and honor to propose ideas to voters and, then, focus on contrasting their ideas' predictable risks, rewards, and secondary effects with those of their opponents (Prov 18:12-13; James 1:19-20, 5:16). It goes both ways as well: CCs have to keep their egos small enough to accept that their proposals will always have flaws (Gen 4:12) and that acting in a positive way on these flaws (fixing or scrapping them) can and will restore all of us toward Jesus Christ (Rom 2:1-4, 14:3; Gal 5:22-25; Col 3:13-15). It points to a profound commitment of non-partisanship in thought: CCs are men and women who have ideas while they themselves are owned by Jesus, and loyal to Him only (Phil 2:7-8). A CC has to prayerfully analyze each and every piece of policy for themselves and not automatically side with their party or a certain interest group (1 Thess 2:2-3; James 1:19-20; Gal 5:23; Rom 15:1-6; Prov 18:13; Mt 10:16).

In actually running a campaign to communicate ideas, CCs must discipline those who work for them to adhere to the correct principles. Toward the opponent, Christian campaigns are respectful, truthful, non-judgmental and have an open dialog about the virtues of those running (Rom 14, 15:1-6; Phil 4:5; Col 3:13-15). False or half-truthful disparaging remarks made for quick political gain are forbidden in Christian tradition (Phil 2:1-11; Acts 15; Gal 6:1-6). All Christians are sheep among wolves: we have to conduct ourselves a positive, inclusive manner free of the fleshy negativity of our politics today (1 Cor 6:1-6; Rom 2:1-4). Like all of us, CCs have to stay focused on glorifying Him in thought, act, and life if He is to bless their works (Isa 37: 34-35). We Christians are just like the donkey that carried Jesus into Jerusalem: it might look to us like we're getting a lot of attention, but that praise is really for the One we lift up!

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Why I am a Republican and The Challenge for Conservative Leadership

I've been asked a handful of times why I consider myself a Republican even after the Bush administration's denial of fiscal conservatism and the party not representing the base for an extended period of time. It's quite simple, really, and I'll answer it in the format of the Michigan GOP's 2008 tear-off calendar...

I am a Republican because...in the 90's, my single mother worked 3 jobs, sometimes 4, and had the opportunity to work as much as she wanted and, thus, provide the lifestyle she wanted for herself and her children. This was made possible by Ronald Reagan (fundamentally changed America) and John Engler (unemployment was down to the lowest point ever under his leadership: 3%). These two leaders defied the establishment Left, reduced the burden of government, and freed all Americans to be as productive and wealthy as they wanted to. While Reagan's federal plans took longer to implement and longer to fade, Engler's were more direct and closer to home, making them quicker to effect change. In my life I have witnessed the success of these plans and their model of 'Opportunity + Freedom = Prosperity = Liberty;' I have also watched as the Left and their ideas infected both parties and have brought this nation, the one that accomplished so much in my childhood and prospered as no other nation in history, to its knees before the world.

The combined destruction wrought by the economic policies of Bill Clinton, Jennifer Granholm, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama is a terrible crime against the people of this nation and my state. Clinton's policies, held off to an extent by Newt Gingrich and his allies in Congress, inevitably have altered, and in the altering, tangled, the economic framework that brought our people so much liberty in the past.

Now, Michigan rots in its longest and gravest economic depression ever. Detroit, once the crown jewel of the republic, sits with 44.8% of its citizens unemployed. Of our state as a whole, more than one out of five people do not have a job. Two million, two hundred and ninety thousand of our neighbors, family members, friends, and former coworkers have been thrown into personal indignity by a government-run, government-decided, government-dominated system that does not work.

When we do find hours, we grab them and change our schedules and activities around them. It really is a fundamental change from the reality my mother raised my brother and I in through the 1990's. In the business she owns now, she's had to cut six jobs, six livelihoods, during this 'still-fragile recovery.' Our new reality makes us beholden to scarce work and, thus, less free to pursue our own interests. This government-altered reality seems to hunt down liberty and exterminate it wherever it can be found.

Instead of being enabled through opportunity and freedom provided by free markets, the elimination and over-regulation of those markets disables us and makes into pawns, bottom feeders, regardless of our level of income. While we run into trouble with our mortgages, property taxes, car payments, college bills, and utility charges, our elected 'leaders' continue to spend and spend and spend and spend, pursuing personal and political goals. They, then, seek to repeat the mistakes of the past and 'help' the economy by distracting us with a nice new paved road or train rides to Disney Land. Historical changes for the absolute worse just like this one repeatedly display the challenge for conservative leadership, a challenge met only somewhat by conservative leaders during the times of Engler and Reagan.

Conservatives have to find and nominate leaders who can build systems that are self-terminating when they've outlived their respect for liberty, but are sustainable in spite of the Left's attempts to bend them to their own devices. That's up to every one of us to ensure these systems get put in place for every one of our 513,000 elected offices. I, a lonesome blogger, dare you to prove your commitment to our principles and ensure that this kind of real change happens in your community. We can bring back that level of opportunity, freedom, prosperity, and liberty that both you and I have experienced in the past. It wont be easy, but think of the daily struggle of our troops who preserve this simple opportunity for us: we ought to do right by them and seize the day.

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I was asked why I oppose the public option and what I would do to reform the MediTwins...

The public option would totally work for liberal goals...but I disagree with the goals and the metrics used to get to those goals.

The public option's main idea is to work as a 'baseline competitor.' For instance: do you seriously use the post office for anything? I dont. But its the 'crap' version of UPS and FedEx...Obama's logic with the public option seems to be that, if we've got that, the rest of the insurance companies will automatically be more efficient. Okay......no one's going to disagree with that 'efficiency' principle (1) and (2) the system already does that BUT FOR government roadblocks (like insurance companies not being able to sell between states...which makes regulation of them by the federal government directly unconstitutional right now, but who cares about that document anyway :( ).

Thus my disagreement comes: it costs way too much (it takes all the costly inefficiencies in the current companies, multiplies them, and centralizes them under one forced-increase-funded source...thus 'breaking' society like Medicare and Medicaid are now)...

...and it will inevitably expand into nationalized health care given the support single payer has from lunatics in DC (Historical example: AMTRAK forced out all other passenger train systems until Reagan cut off their tax$ support, thus realizing higher prices paid by riders...by then, traveling by train had gone culturally 'out of style' and few use it anymore...choosing cars and hurting the environment/whatever- same concept w/ public option).

If you want to lower the cost of medical care, you have to get rid of the 1940's concept of insurance. 21st century dental insurance is a perfect example: Aspen Dental in Holland, MI charges $30 for a cleaning. Small business dentists charge $60 per cleaning and have much more profit than Aspen. Aspen will not accept insurance while 'local' dentists draw those with insurance. Why? If you have to pay out of pocket, you care about the cost; having insurance with a set premium eliminates that care. This injects competition much faster than a MASSIVE and EXPANDING and HISTORIC and WHATEVER government program.

Working within the current concept of insurance, %-based premiums would have the same effect (to a smaller and slower degree) in the private sector as eliminating insurance completely (something we shouldnt do...free markets and all). If I have to pay 25% of my Allegra-D, I'd pay like $30; if I had to pay 25% of the generic, I'd spend $2.50 for the same thing. Right now I have a flat $5 premium for my script insurance...so I'm going to go with the hugely expensive brand version because I dont care about the cost. %-based premiums simply provide an incentive to lower costs across the board with little or no impact on Research and Development.

Second on the Public Option, research and development will DIE as private corps start to lower prices to the self insured. In a WAM BAM DO IT NOW government solution, theyll cut the most expendable thing: R&D. This means a world-wide dark age for pharmaceuticals (i.e. end up going with Galen's pre-Christ research in the 1700's...a dark age in pharma). No new drugs, no new medicines advertised on tv, nothing. (The US produces 85-90% of treatments/drugs in the world. Second is UK, third Japan)
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To reform M/M: first of all, privatize Social Security and put Medicaid back under the SSA. It was stupid to separate it in the 70's and has been an abject, dismal failure. When that's done, the people that take it over will immediately move to personal medical savings accounts for those under 30, and pay out for those who have paid in already. Third, I'd make Social Security optional so it and its new Healthcare Department have to compete with private life insurance companies...like it did in the 50's when it 'worked' (read: lost to private insurance co's...until we outlawed them. Reagan's 1964 GOP convention speech references SS failures).

For Medicare: take all of it and put it under the states. If you crazies really want wealth redistributed from those 'rich' places like Michigan to those 'poor' places like Texas (as it is now lol), youd continue the contributions. However, I wouldnt do that...let the states do it all. If they run it into the ground, it'll be much more public and much easier for people to fix them. It was public in the 60's when they ran their own welfare states into the ground...and you can hide it much easier in Washington...thus the political elite put it in Washington in the 70's...

There will also be more innovation in improving the system due to having 50 different ways of doing it. A large number of cases along a normal distribution works much better for improving systems than a SINGLE NATIONAL FIST way of doing things (see picture...the center or average quality/cost, in this case, will 'chase' the top dawgs toward higher quality and lower cost to the right)

...then we're talking about the first book I'm going to begin writing next year...on how governments attempt to create a 'present' (something that doesnt exist) within which to operate and fix things.

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Capitalism, Feudalism, and Socialism

From Thomas Sowell: "Marxism is an ism that has become a wasm."

Socialists, ignorant of history, say that capitalism carries on feudalism (they really mean manorialism, but theyre too stupid to do their homework before mouthing off). However, they should note that capitalism is the direct opposite of feudalism. Capitalists seek to serve every need of a human being while Socialism, much more like feudalism, has historically sought to defeat the infinite dimensions of the individual and subordinate us to the state as solely economic vessels. Both socialism and feudalism do great violence to the spirit during this 'collectivization' and, thus, fail to provide, as Capitalism does, the greatest selection of highest quality goods and services at the lowest cost.

Instead of tracing a society's move backward to socialism and Daddy government by watching ideological policies, we are much better served by tracing the known effects. America since the 1930's has grown more and more socialistic (or more like its close brother Fascism which the Left Wing of the Democratic Party conveniently calls 'crony capitalism') and it is apparent in the effects. Under capitalism, the government would never have such strict control over labor (compulsory minimum wage, government enforcement of 'closed shop' rules, OSHA mandates, etc.) and natural resources ("protection" of coastal oil fields, imperial EPA greatly outstripping its legal authority and going WAY beyond protecting the environment). Further, under free capitalism, the government is not a legitimate investor, it has no authority to tell you what to buy, it does not run services, it doesnt make laws governing the use of products, warnings and nutrition information doesnt exist, among a number of other things you believe are good. Ask yourself this: how much more innovation could have taken place in the last 50 years if free markets were the laws of the land and not the socialist imperialism? How would we control our cars if the government didnt mandate the 1890's concept of 1 WHEEL, TWO PEDALS? How would toilets get rid of waste if the government didnt mandate the 1880's concept of swirling water? It's crazy to consider because a toilet which 'flushes' with __gal of water -and a car that operates on a way-too-simple control system- are second nature to us.

But that's socialism! It's socialism that causes societies to lack individual innovation and employment of individual skills just like the system that kept European and Far Eastern quality of life the same for hundreds of years...and it's socialism that threatens to do that to our world. We have to come to the understanding that, regardless of Socialist 'Newspeak,' their system is backward while free markets and private innovation are moves forward. There is great potential in people of my generation for a great national recognition of these simple truths.

We understand that the internet changes everything. We can communicate and disseminate ideas much faster than our parents' generation. For example, we know costly, unfair, established unions can be replaced with a Facebook group. There are all these little things that, together, can drastically increase our take-home pay while eliminating and thinning those entities which oppose liberty in our society...more older people just have to get on board in opposing 21st century feudalism.

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My Religious Views

I've been asked about what my 'religious views' are...

Put simply, the word "religion" has no meaning. It's far too general and, of course, my "religion" doesn't cause me to blow up buildings. I, rather, like the word "faith." My own personal faith and theology are topics for a not-so-late post, but please know that I try to derive everything I do from my faith.

On that note, check out this video...

Happy New Year :) I have a feeling that it will be a good year for us all :)

and

Prayers out for a quick recovery for Rush Limbaugh who was hospitalized with "chest pains" recently.