Rejecting the Lies: Why so LIttle Publicity?

Michelle Malkin long ago earned her spurs for, in part, exposing the ulterior motives of Corruptocrats' oppressive mommy state.  In her article, "Hey, Eric Holder: Meet My People" she celebrates the lives of some US patriots who have thrown off the yoke of hyphenated Americanism.  Katrina Pierson is of them.  She supports limited government principles and rejects left-wing identity politics. 

Katrina admonished the NCAA's racist policies and asserted that the reality is that we colored people no longer require the assistance from other Negros for advancement,” Pierson said. “These groups run to the rescue of distressed brown people only when the media deems it newsworthy. Meanwhile, there are inner city black children who continue to grow up fatherless while sharing a neighborhood with stray bullets, drugs and a plethora of liquor stores on every corner.

Katrina Pierson is a hero.  For further reading go here.  

Unfortunately, it seems as if for every liberty loving hero there is a would-be-thief in progressive-socialist clothing echoing the lets-spread-the-wealth-around philosophies of O-buma.  Michael Moore is one of them.  Be certain to sanitize after watching this.  Such thievery exists because we allow it to occur.  Remember the words of Dietrich Bonhoeffer.  Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.   

In his article "Re: Michael Moore vs. Abraham Lincoln," John Steele Gordon expresses dismay that the mainstream compliant and complicit media's representatives provide Moore an arena in which he can disseminate his socialist propaganda.  Together they have little regard for facts.  Gordon asks pointedly, how could the world be vastly richer today — and nearly everyone’s standard of living is vastly higher than it was a century ago — if wealth can only be redistributed not created?  

Moore also doesn’t seem to understand the concept of capital and its centrality to wealth creation. General Motors could not manufacture cars without the auto workers who work in GM factories. But the workers equally could not manufacture cars without the GM factories to work in. And factories are capital, which, in this sense, is defined as “accumulated goods devoted to the production of other goods.  

Gordon further reveals Moore's inability to comprehend economic matters by explaining that the so-called rich in the real world don’t stash their hoards of cash in money bins. They invest it in factories and research and design, in order to make new goods that people need, often so that they can produce new goods themselves more easily and quickly.  Moore should heed Lincoln's advice that it is better to be silent and thought a fool than to open one's mouth only to remove all doubt.

May your gods be with you.  

Head Start, Even Start: Abject Failure

All federal programs should be evaluated for their effectiveness every three or four years to determine whether the funding that they receive is justified.  If not, Congress should be forbidden from appropriating tax money for the failed agency, department, or program.  The Head Start and Even Start programs are prime examples of squandered taxpayer dollars, as this article shows.  Recent examination of these boondoggles found the following.

The study tracked the progress of three- and four-year-olds entering Head Start through kindergarten and the first grade.  Overall, the program had little to no positive effects for children granted access to Head Start. For the four-year-old group, compared to similarly situated children not allowed access to Head Start, access to the program failed to raise the cognitive abilities of Head Start participants on 41 measures.  Specifically, the language skills, literacy, math skills, and school performance of the participating children failed to improve.

Alarmingly, access to Head Start for the three-year-old group actually had a harmful effect on the teacher-assessed math ability of these children once they entered kindergarten.  Teachers reported that non-participating children were more prepared in math skills than those children who participated in Head Start.

Also, Head Start has little to no effect on the other socio-emotional, health, and parenting outcomes of children participating in the program.[9] For the four-year-old group, access to Head Start failed to have an effect for 70 out of 71 socio-emotional, health, and parenting outcomes.  The three-year-old group did slightly better: Access to Head Start failed to have an effect for 66 of the 71 socio-emotional, health, and parenting outcomes.

Not only did these programs fail to help, some aspects actually hindered children’s development.

Facilities for these programs are usually located conveniently near federally funded housing projects or other subsidized housing.  The percentage of female headed single-parent families there is staggeringly high.  The effects of single parenting on children are harmful and detrimental to society as a whole.

In mother-only families, children tend to experience short-and long-term economic and psychological disadvantages; higher absentee rates at school, lower levels of education, and higher dropout rates (with boys more negatively affected than girls); and more delinquent activity, including alcohol and drug addiction.

Children in single-mother homes are also more likely to experience health-related problems as a result of the decline in their living standard, including the lack of health insurance (Mauldin 1990). Later, as children from single-parent families become adults, they are more likely to marry early, have children early, and divorce. Girls are at greater risk of becoming single mothers as a result of non-marital childbearing or divorce.

Another article revealed additional problems associated with single parenting.

[T]he number of children ages 15-17 in school and in good health is much lower in this group of children, and the number of children becoming pregnant at these ages is increasing.  It has been found that adolescents from single-parent families were found to be three times more likely to be depressed than those living with two parents.  Single parent homes are also associated with criminal activity in the U.S.A. Children from a single-parent household account for 72% of teenage murderers, 60% percent of people who commit rape crimes and are eleven times more likely to exhibit violent behavior.

So, Even Start and Head Start are failed experiments that provide cost free day care to unemployed single mothers who live in taxpayer subsidized housing.  It would seem that warehousing those children does little more than to provide opportunities for their mothers to breed more TANF recipients.  The kids from such an environment tend to be violent, to fail academically, to be welfare dependent, to produce at-risk, out-of-wedlock children, and to create successive generations of social and economic failure.  It is inexcusable that taxpayers' money is confiscated from them to maintain this cycle of poverty and despair.  

Gosh, could it be that bureaucrats and Theftocrats might benefit from keeping their constituents trapped in the federal welfare swamp?  Pogo was right.  We have met the enemy, and he is us.  

May your gods be with you.

Gang O-buma: The Ruling Class Elite

Angelo M. Codevilla's article about America's ruling class offers insight into many of the country's ills and why solving problems at the national level is so difficult.  The current ruling class elites are resolute enemies of liberty.  That is, if liberty is the extent to which the lives of individuals are free from government interference.

The Corruptocrat's totalitarian mommy state is the enemy of liberty because, through it, they hope to establish complete control of virtually every aspect of life by unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats.  From Julius Seizure Genachowski's attempts to muzzle free speech on the Internet, to O-bumaCare's edict that all Americans must buy health insurance, to the Environmental Protection Agency's carbon propaganda intended to make our light bills skyrocket, there are regulations that control and manipulate nearly every aspect of Americans' lives.    

Our ruling class's agenda is power for itself. While it stakes its claim through intellectual-moral pretense, it holds power by one of the oldest and most prosaic of means: patronage and promises thereof.

By taxing and parceling out more than a third of what Americans produce, through regulations that reach deep into American life, our ruling class is making itself the arbiter of wealth and poverty. While the economic value of anything depends on sellers and buyers agreeing on that value as civil equals in the absence of force, modern government is about nothing if not tampering with civil equality. By endowing some in society with power to force others to sell cheaper than they would, and forcing others yet to buy at higher prices -- even to buy in the first place -- modern government makes valuable some things that are not, and devalues others that are. Thus if you are not among the favored guests at the table where officials make detailed lists of who is to receive what at whose expense, you are on the menu. Eventually, pretending forcibly that valueless things have value dilutes the currency's value for all.

In his article “How to short circuit the ruling class,” author Wes Vernon poses an interesting question.  He wonders, [m]aybe we should have the right to elect (or defeat) the faceless bureaucrats who presume the right to dominate our lives. Why not?  After all, these people have anointed themselves with the power to create legislation arbitrarily, not merely taboos, or thou-shalt-nots that prohibit actions, but totems, or must-do orders that force kow towing to their supreme authority.
 

They are the segment of our population that presumes to set the limits of what Americans should be told, what issues are to be discussed (and which ones are to be ignored), the cultural tenor of the nation, what we can eat, what we can hear, what we can wear, what we can drive, and — what we can say.

This is why voters should have the right to vote them into and out of office.  Vernon offers a concise version of Dr. Codevilla’s message, he states, Basically, here's what the professor would say to the arrogant, faceless bureaucrats with ipso facto quasi-legislative or quasi-judicial powers as to how the rest of us are to live our lives: Let the voters decide whether you get to keep your job.

Bureaucrats are the hammer that fashions progressives’ totalitarian state.  In Investor’s Business Daily, an article titled “Obama’s ‘Progressive’ Failures” quotes the president bragging that he had enacted the most progressive legislative agenda in decades.  The article continues by describing the progressive philosophy such that it stresses the importance of centralized government control over Americans' lives as paramount. It actively seeks to diminish the constitutional limits on what government can — and can't — do. 
 

It further exposes progressive totalitarianism by revealing that its [a]dherents understood that the idea of limited government based on individualism, natural rights and property rights — as defined by the Founding Fathers — had to be discredited.
 

It stood in the way of their social engineering agenda, which views patriotism as a danger, religion as a vice and constitutionalism as a mere historical tic to be eradicated.

In short, progressivism is a creed of Big Government — government with few checks and balances; government not of the people, by the people and for the people, but government of, by and for the special interests and elites that form the movement's backbone.
 

Senator Rand Paul has a plan to save taxpayers one-half a trillion dollars and significantly reduce the federal government’s footprint.  This article is required reading for lovers of liberty everywhere.
 

The elections in November, 2010, showed clearly that Americans want a live-and-let-live world in which liberty and free expression are championed and cherished.  We are chafing under the oppressive yoke imposed on us by The One and the other socialist-progressive ruling class elites.  It is time for the governed to seize the reins of government once again.  Remember the words of Barry Goldwater.  I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice! And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue!

May your gods be with you.  
 

A Rose by any Other Name

The chart at the left depicts progressives' brains.  According to them, words only mean what they mean when it is convenient or politically expedient for them.  Their members are a mental, moral, and ideological collective that is similar to Star Trek’s Borg; they are the collective conscious crowd.  Having unthinkingly adopted the Borg’s prepackaged collection of values and beliefs, they also parrot Borg propaganda, disinformation, and boilerplate.
 

This group likes to use euphemisms to mislead others.  A euphemism is a term that is substituted for another word that more accurately but inconveniently exposes attributes that Borg wishes to hide.  They try to hide their dishonesty by arguing that words have more than one meaning.  That claim is accurate but misleading because each meaning has but one definition, no matter how it may be rephrased, paraphrased, or euphemised.

For them, a prostitute is a sex worker, not a hooker.  They want to sanitize references to that behavior as part of their campaign to de-criminalize prostitution based upon their unfounded belief that the whore in the equation is actually a victim.  They resolutely refuse to address assertions that the women to whom hookers transmit STDs, hepatitis C, tuberculosis, and other deadly maladies are the real victims.  They are the wives, lovers, and girlfriends of their tricks.
 

Pandering to victims, both actual and contrived, requires much subversion of the English language.  English is rarely taught in today’s schools, but mastery of it could help expose much of the Borg’s verbal trickery.  Some of it is subtle, and some is blatant.  Borg is collectivist by nature.  It operates much like a colony of ants, passing signals along by exchanging chemicals and body language because specifically articulated stand-your-ground statements are subject to examination, analysis, and logical refutation.

Borg boilerplate includes misuses of terms such as society and community.  They like to proclaim grandly that “Society should do more…"or that “the goal of society should be…”  Another favorite Borgism is the claim that “the community does far too little…"or that “the community rose up.”  Used thusly, both terms are collective nouns. 
 

A collective noun is merely an invention, a construct of language that was created to name a collection of objects or people.  It does not possess the characteristics of what it names because it lacks a physical presence.  Another such term is corporation.  A corporation is a tax status that the IRS awards to the people who own a business; still, Borg claims that “corporations harm the environment” as though a tax status could create pollution.
 

This sort of con job is anthropomorphically invalid; this means it is an attempt to give human characteristics to that which is not human.  It is vitally important to scrutinize what Borg says and does because they are nothing if not devious.  All of this has been leading to another deceitfully invented word meaning, or neologism.  The way that Borg uses the term racism is inconsistent with the term’s established meaning and a form of faulty reasoning that is known as question begging.

First, Borg’s operational definition of racism is “insufficient pandering.”  The insufficient part of the term is where the question begging lies.  The Borg has not established the justification for pandering to any extent, much less insufficiently, to their chosen few.  Apparently, they assume that no one will notice this unwarranted leap of logic.  Now, to address the term itself.
 

The world’s gold standard for lexicography and etymology in reference to the English language is the Oxford English Dictionary.  It defines the term racism thusly:  (Belief in, adherence to, or advocacy of) the theory that all members of each race possess characteristics, abilities, qualities etc., specific to that race, esp. distinguishing it as inferior or superior to another race or races; prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism based on this.
 

Nowhere does this definition mention set asides, quotas, affirmative action, padded SAT scores, selective law enforcement, segregated and inferior requirements and expectations as to conduct and performance, social promotion through school, or any of the other myriad forms of official government policies of racial discrimination.
  
Despite this, in Seattle, WA, the place that has more sociology professors, English literature majors, and latte-sucking progressives than any other metropolitan area in the US, we have the legal and ethical abomination known as the Race and Social Justice Initiative.  This example of government enforced racial discrimination was invented about five years ago.  It operates like a welfare program that only serves people with melanin-positive skin.  

The Examiner has an article by Steve Pomper in it about RSJI.  He points out that the RSJI is chock full of how this liberal City government has failed in area after area, decade after decade to establish “race equity, social, economic,” and—get this—“environmental justice,” among some other equally absurd goals (such as promoting “green-collar” jobs), for its residents.  The document itself infers just how racist this city must be if it oppresses [colored people] to such a degree that such an initiative is necessary.
 

Now, let’s get back to why the city would issue such a caustic RSJI report condemning itself in such a brutal manner.  It’s because, although I’m certain they’d much prefer condemning conservatives, there are virtually none—the Seattle conservative competes with Sasquatch as the Emerald City’s most mythological creature.
 

So instead, the progressives seem to have created this amorphous idea of some unspoken, undefined, nebulous, racist "enemy,” which seems to simply exist independent of someone or some group to blame.  Seattle’s apparent institutional racism exists at the hands of this unnamed enemy, because, since progressives can’t blame themselves, and they certainly can’t blame conservatives who haven’t held any sway in Seattle’s politics since at least the eighties, progressives just sort of let the idea float out there in the political ether that “someone” is responsible for the need for RSJI in Seattle, just not them, but don’t worry, they’re sure going to fix it—this time—for real—for sure.

So, in Seattle social justice means racial pandering, lax law enforcement, and government guaranteed privileges and benefits that are not available to all of the city’s residents.  Fifty years ago, official government policies of racial discrimination were perfectly legal, but progressives claim that they were morally wrong.  Now that racial discrimination has allegedly been outlawed, THEIR official government policies of racial discrimination are morally proper.  Hypocrisy is a particularly reprehensible form of lying.

May your gods be with you.