Portland
             ....so decided that the Boys of Summer should not become the ice men of winter this year.

          Still, owing to the fact that we have more or less concluded we can muddle through anything without His help, I suspect He'll eventually turn His back and allow there to be a Rockies-White Sox World Series in some late October, as well.
          Baseball was no more intended to be played in a frozen palace of ice than Man was intended to be subservient to bureaucratic microbes.
          I guess God will let us relearn those basic laws the hard way...since we're so smart.
BC

Portland, 10 October, 2009
        Yes, I know the Peace Prize feeds a megalomania we all have dreaded seeing being pumped up, but still...
 ...the notion that the man could be had in the first place...and for so little...
 ...a stoke of the vanity, a chace to give $1.4 mil away (to anyone other than his family in Kenya, Boston, and other sordid parts of the globe) in exchange for a shift in US foreign policy toward one that coincides with a Euro self-destruction model that has already well metastisized, it's death rattle only a few years away. I can hear the mullahs' peal over Stockholm as I write.

    And we still complain about lobbyists who want to swap a weekend of booze and babes in exchange for a sweetheart contract.
Even John Murtha wouldn't accept a bribe this blatant.
BC

Portland
       Thanks to OB the Gaunt, I just won $2000, and his commission is 20%, standard Chicago finder's fee.
       I learned in my college days, never bet your sentiments. Find some other Tigers fan, and let him bet his. Just two weeks after OB the Pious was coronated , I bet a bunch of businessmen that OB the Lame would get the Nobel Peace Prize while still in office. They gave 5 to 1 odds, and I put up $400. I go by to pick up my winnings this weekend.
      Thanks OB the LopEared. I owe you.
BC

Richmond, Oct 9, 2009
       The time of the quickening is upon us.

       Within a week, both houses of Congress will have drafted clever language, not only to fool us, but their own Members, so as to assuage their fears that we are onto them.
       We need to make it clear to them, all of them, even the most unrepentant of leftists, that we have not been fooled and that a severe and permanent price will be paid for passage of any health care plan that takes away the individual's right to choose his/her own medical care and provider, which includes choosing none at all.
        These things we know:
        1) Any government interference in this basic right is unconstitutional and illegal, and that short of the assassination or untimely death of any one of four Supreme Court justices, that outcome is unlikely to change;
        2) The Congress knows this, so are acting with malice aforethought. They are sneaking this law past their members and the People, so are not innocently walking into a giant mistake they will wish they could undo in a few years;
        3) The federal government has never undertaken any plan for reform that has not failed miserably, made matters worse, and cost exponentially more than the Congress and Presidents have promised it would cost, so we can only assume that today the term "reform" is either used cynically or, in Marxist-speech, as a double-entendre, as when they speak of burning the Constitution also to be a "reform".

        Passage of this bill in any form cannot be allowed, or, in the alternative, every voting member of Congress must lay his/her name in the "Aye" column with clear understanding of the consequences.
        If this bill is passed the fuse will be lit. There will be no "oops" or "do-overs".
        Tell Congress, each one of them, individually, that if this bill is passed they will have called down the thunder on their heads, and Hell will follow.
        Tell them to "Get out...and Get a Lawyer".
VB


  

Richmond, Oct 6, 2009
     Kudos to my friend Bernie Chumm for coining a new slogan, "Black Gringo". It deserves a bumper sticker, maybe even some poster art.
     But what was Obama thinking?
     No one in the south, even Hugo Chavez, will ever believe Obama again, after all the anti-colonial, anti-big stick talk, he goes and pulls a TR and tries to ride rough shod over the one thing every single Latin American is in total agreement about...that it's high time for the Latinos to host an Olympics.
     Wow!
     It's interesting, too, Bernie, that no one, even in the right wing media has picked up on this singular blunder. Good show!
VB

      If you're new to this site, I invite you to read the three prior pieces, having to do with the necessity of 1) political victory in order to 2) recapture central institutions (education, advertising, over-sized bureaucracies) in order to neutralize their effect on us, and our children.
      As the founders saw it, vigilance by citizens of their government was as natural an act as double checking the change given back by a cashier at a drug store. It was always government's intent that citizens should take it and its practices on faith, without question, in blind obedience or subservience. It was always free men's duty to resist this urge, in order to stay free. America was the first time free men got to be on top.
     So the founders realized that citizens had to do some work in protecting their investment in this new found Liberty. (Moses Sands personalized it by calling it "their investment in their House"). First and foremost was in their choice of representatives sent to the state and national capitals. Even in 1790 the founders knew what a trip to the "big city" must be like for some of these backwoods congressmen....whooeeee!...so went to lengths protecting a press that would keep folks back home apprised of what Rep Slim Pickens was doing on his big spree to Washington City...even in 1810.
     But they also intended that every trip to Washington, or Nashville or Jeff City be seen as a chore to the congressmen, not a junket. They wanted it to be a type of a loss or pain, so that Congress would hurry to tidy up business and the members could get back home to tend the farm, the store, and the family. They wanted these to be citizen-legislators. I don't think the Founders were too keen on the idea of a permanent and professional legislature, and what do you know, I think the American people are finally beginning to agree with them again...after what, 125 years of abstentions? 'Bout time.
     The Founders intended that the real job of government be carried out right under the citizens' noses, at the local level, where thievery, chicanery and corruption, as well as the over-collection of taxes, could be dealt with swiftly, and with finality. Even today citizens are more interested in the potholes in front of their house than the other kinds of holes lounging around in Washington.
     The Founders were not children. Some would have winced when Jefferson "bought the West" in 1803, but they already knew that if there was a waterway big enough to carry a boat that commerce would be built upon it and at the most favorable landing on one side of the river or the other. Imagine the difference between Ohio and Kentucky, as DeToqueville saw it, between a bustling city of commerce and slavery, all because, at that spot (at Cincinnati) the Ohio River bent right rather then left, making the north shore the better place for landing boats. Slavery and free commerce didn't mix then, just as it doesn't now under the guise of socialism.
     The Founders didn't have to know the industrial age to know that it would someday occur, and the problems it would bring. They had already watched three or more generations of "refugees" from Europe disembark to start a new life here, and they had already seen what poor yeoman stock could do, so the idea of poor Slovaks, even Papists, probably wouldn't have frightened them very much. Every Founder stood on such yeoman shoulders. Every Founder had been taught to remember, and had been taught to pass it on.
     They knew it would be hectic, erratic, at times ugly, unplanned and disorderly but in the end they knew it would be good, because, in their own lives they had seen all this happen before. (I recommend any good social history of the American colonies in the 18th Century, before the Revolution, just to be able to tally all the changes the Founders had seen in their own lifetimes.)
     If the Founders made a mistake it was in failing to say (write) more about the unwritten essences, the essences they more or less took for granted, of their new Republic that would make up the seeds of Liberty, to be passed on, family-to-family, House to House, rather than through political writ. If you will recall, they assumed all the language found in the Bill of Rights, until the anti-Federalists forced them to be written down, writ large. Imagine the sport lawyers would've had with the Constitution had the Bill of Rights only been assumed.
    The same goes for the commonly understood beliefs in the Americas as to what a man and woman would do with their House once they actually could get hold of it. Political and philosophical writings of the era, all the way back to Shakespeare, are filled with such references to the common sense of the common man, but by inference mostly, as in "as every body knows", rather than black and white edict. You can read Smith's Wealth of Nations one way, and come away with some good rules you can quote to shut down a liberal at most any cocktail party. But you can read Smith another way, and write a book twice its length just about the common sense he references, a common sense that "even Homer Simpson could figure out" (Moses Sands). It was in that vein that the Founders sat down the Constitution and the Federalist Papers...they spoke of things every common man could easily grasp in their everyday lives.
    The common culture, now referred to as the "popular culture" contained all those essences, and those essences were the underlying support system for the Republic. The Republic can't make it without this support system, just as a free people can't make it without the Constitution.
    This is what we have to recover...and we can't do it at the end of a gun, or by legislative fiat. We can't destroy the Bills of Rights in order to save it, and trying to take back the culture with a sledge hammer will do just that. We have to win the hearts and minds of the people once again. We have to make virtue Cool! But make no mistake about it, no matter how much you may think you are in control of your House, the Left controls that culture that begins just outside your front door...and has been sneaking in at night, via the internet and television, and through the public places and schools you and your children visit, for many years. You no longer can wait until they have kicked down the door to your home to start fighting back. You must go to the defense of your neighbors now.

Recapturing the Culture: At Home
     It is from this point that we must now, win or lose politically in this current Rebellion, pick up the Founder's unwritten assumptions about us and recast them into the soul of our community and our House. For you see, it was always those unwritten assumptions about us that the Left most wants to change. Corrupt us, corrupt our souls, and they win. (When you put it that way it sounds suspiciously like the Devil, doesn't it?) Their revolution, which began ages ago, was always about reducing us to their template of what they think we should be...crass, ignorant barbarians. Just look at the territory they already own (the inner city, New Orleans, Detroit) to see how they think we should be.
     Moses Sands probably saw this better than anyone I'd ever known, and since 1998 (until he headed to the high passes in 2006) he wanted (me) to write a book (for him) about those unwritten essences.
     What follows here is a book outline more or less, for 250 pages would do the subject better justice. Moreover, if you have read us in the past, you know we already engage in Agitprop projects (as I call it) in trying to re-insinuate the icons of those assumptions into the Pop Culture, which the Left currently owns.

     "Taking Back the Culture" falls into two broad categories: 1) Taking Back and Defending the House: These are things the average citizen can do in his and her own House, and with their neighbors...besides the political activities they are already engaged...and 2) Re-establishing Good and Virtue as Popular Totems within the Culture: These are things that must now be done in the form of an organized way to some degree, the same way (and by some of the same means) the Left has used the past 40 years to wrest control of the culture away from us.
     As for your own House, no two are the same. Your House, and your children will progress based on what you teach them, not on what you deny them to learn in the popular culture. This rule is as old as Methuselah. Ever hear of PK's (Preacher's kids)? A stereotype, yes, but one based on the fact so many turned out rotten. The over-protected daughter is the one who is most likely going to run off with the first Fonzie in her life. I'm using 50 year old metaphors here. In my dad's day, it was running off and joining the circus. Kids rebel, and every child has a period where, as my mother said, must be prayed through the valley of death. Then, once through it, they come back to the core essence of what they were taught. If you don't teach them anything, there's nothing to come back to. Protecting them and teaching them are two different things. You must teach.
     And as we know in education, the best time to begin building certain loves, such as love of country, is around the 3rd or 4th grade. The Marxists also know this, by the way. If they can grab your kid before he/she gets into middle school, they will own him.
     What schools (intentionally, I submit) don't teach is how to think. Critical thinking is the key...the ability to tell a horse from a mule, as one fellow described it. They can only learn this at home. I suggest searching Amazon.com and finding old school books on logic and ethics, which were taught at one time in schools, around 1900. (We're considering a rewrite for the modern home. I'm discussing it with Bernie.) Every home should have an American history book written before 1930.
     And, if this "taking back your House" theme is relatively new to you, then there is the problem of how to begin teaching a 13 year old, or 15 year old to understand the new reality when they have never really heard the word "no" before.
     You have a problem here which requires an intervention of sorts. There is literature and various programs out there, but the key is that you must be the one to impart both reality and the logic of this change in your House to those children. It would help if there were two of you. And it would help more if you know how to pray...for the biggest hurdle you will have will not be those "I hate you's" from your child, but from your own anxiety in having to take time away from your precious day, your own precious free time, your favorite television...
     ...to save your child and the future of your House.
     In the end, many of you won't. I already know that. Just don't quit trying, for every little thing you even try to impart today will still be with your child after they pass through the valley.
     
     No two of you could agree as to how the culture should be shaped. The Founders understood this, and decided that the House (not the individual) should be the best building block. The difference between the poor failing House and the fair-to-middling House and the excellent House has nothing to do with money and education and certainly not the ability to know which butter knife to use to eat your peas with. It has to do with some fundamental rules of common sense, and by "common sense" I mean this as much as Farmer Tom meant it or as Tom Paine or Glenn Beck intended it.
     To save time, we have to jump forward from the rules (blueprints) of building your House. I have to assume that if you are reading this your House is in pretty good order, or, is in the process of being "refitted".
     Rescuing the culture involves first, setting your own House in order, by example, for it was the example of the successful House, the moral House, the honest House, the diligent House, that the Founders assumed would guide the community and the nation. The Founders believed that if every man were given the freedom to build and own his own House, and have the right to grow it, and pass it on, he would accept the gift. That is no longer the case, for nearly half of Americans, especially among the young, see no "gift" in anything that requires work and effort, and will swap almost any freedom in exchange for anything that is fun and free. This is a fact we must undo, but we cannot undo politically.
     Sadly, the Founders felt absolutely no need to set down a book or list of rules as to how to build that House, brick by brick. Instead, the 10th Amendment merely provided the states and local governments the power to polish up those rules according to community standards...meaning that every community was a petrie dish, providing evidence of what worked and what didn't work. We all built our houses based on evidence before our very eyes as to what worked and what didn't.
     All that was once upon a time. Once upon a time everyone wanted to live on this side of the tracks and strove to better their lives to make it so. Now, one of government's principal purposes is to make life on the other side of the tracks at least habitable enough, and so effortless, that non will want, or even try to come over. The only passport for crossing over is when one on this side goes over and selects (taps out) a lucky lottery winner to come on over and join us. Barack and Michelle are among these tapped candidates. So is Sotomajor. Certain strings are attached to this passport, as we see time and time again, but the benefits package is great. Clarence Thomas, on the other hand, was no more than a runaway, who skipped bail. Such impertinence is never treated well.
     Taking back the House and the culture has to be by example. Read the Boy Scout Law or the 7 virtues and you will know what personal characteristics you and your House need to exhibit. Your first rule of order is to pass that on to your children. It helps if you can stay married, as half a House is almost always doomed to fall...and I am sorry, there is almost nothing to pass onto a kid that can override that one glaring act of betrayal. Almost every thing you teach them is either down the drain or at least diluted because of divorce.
     Divorce is an utter act of selfishness. Yes, I know there are exceptions, just as there is with abortion...rape, incest... I won't debate that here. But the vast majority of divorces are between two kids who probably shouldn't have gotten married in the first place, or probably not so young, and probably for all the wrong reasons. Marriage is a contract to build a family corporation (the House) together, and to train the next generation of stockholders. It is not a promise to share bathtubs and Coronas in Nassau.
     The first duty of education is in your House. That is where the child learns of the shoulders he or she is standing upon. Teach them that, and nothing the public school system will every teach them can untie that bond. If a teacher, or the school tries to, take it personally. Attend to it. If there are lesser gods below God, Mother and Father, Mom and Dad, Mama and Papa, will be those gods. Not "Teacher". Everything of value that a child needs to know should come from the distance of your knee (and sometimes across it). Public schools will provide the footnotes, and the "Read More" list. You will provide the context.
      Why is this so? Because by then you will have taken back the schools, and run out of town on a rail the teachers, administrators, bureaucrats and legislators who want to indoctrinate your child with any political notion.
      But isn't American exceptionalism a political doctrine? Isn't love of country a political doctrine? Isn't the Constitution political? Actually, no. Only the enemies of the Constitution want to declare these things "political". Look down at the shoulders, and the shoulder's shoulders you are standing on. That is a fact, not politics, and that is the fact of American exceptionalism...that we all descended from the most common and lowborn of people, and we arose to build the mightiest nation, the freest nation, and the best damned air conditioner repair company in Broken Bow, Oklahoma. Every "liberal" alive is pissing on the shoulders he or she is standing on. Their whole life's theme is one of ingratitude....hateful, spiteful ingratitude.
      By taking back and running the schools, you, as an alliance of citizens will decide what is political and what is not in your local schools. And you and an alliance of citizens will decide what is and is not political in your schools statewide. No bureaucrat will decide that. No one other than you will decide what is to be in those textbooks. Not even the US Congress has jurisdiction over your schools...and you will fire or otherwise run out of Washington on a rail any member of Congress who say otherwise. Only the US Supreme Court can draw a boundary on this power, and only they according to the limits laid out in the U S Constitution...or they'll be looking for a lawyer, too. This is how you must approach this problem.
     Teach your children manners. To be polite. Simple things, such as "please", "Thank you", "Yes, ma'm, "No, sir". They learn this first around the dinner table. The toy aisle at Walmart is not the place to first decide to demonstrate these new pleasantries. Since there are some (now many) homes that don't teach this, it is your responsibility to lay out a list of things the schools should impart to these impoverished children, such as manners, honor, personal responsibility. Keep this list small, and keep it ecumenical, and on a short leash, for you do not want the schools to think you have turned your children over to them to raise, for they will accept the offer if allowed to persist in this belief.

      In the end, all you are doing here is establishing a virtual perimeter of morality around a House you once thought four walls, a gate, and a schnauzer could protect.
      How your House matters is that it sets out an example. Despite the best attempts of advertisres (another enemy of your House), the social pecking order is built around the way a child (and family) present themselves publically, as much as the kind of car, the dollar tag on the neighborhood they live in and other economic amentities. From the beginning of time kids have separated themselves off in cliques of like-minded individuals, from football players to science club members. Just as town with 22 Christian churches and a small synagogue, that toewn becomes ecumenical the day someone from one of those 22 churches reaches out to a member of the synagogue and invites him to Kiwanis. School children also break up into groups based on economic status, which of course, is most readily identified with the clothes they wear, and now I suppose, their phone service. This is not good for the culture, so should be discouraged. But rather than ban cell phones, or order school uniforms, all that is required is that a few students (it doesn't take many) to simply treach out, and cross over and comingle with other groups. I remember Moses Sands telling me that in his school, in the 1930s, it was the captain of the football team who protected all the geeks in the school from bullies. What a novel idea.
     If you have noticed lately, childrens' clothing styles favor the super-affluent look (where you shell out $50 for a $5 top simply because of the label) or the trashy look (where you shell out only $30 for an outfit that looks like it came off a Salvation Army rack...and was once used by a prostitute before she was saved.) The well stocked middle class wardrobe seems to need a healthy inventory of both, so that any social situation can be met with the proper attire.
     Trust me, except for the real gutter trash (whose army seems to be getting bigger all the time) and the really rich, the rest of the parents would give worlds to put a stop to this madness. This madness has to stop one household at a time. Be the first on your block. You will find others whose budget is being pushed to the max who will join you. Read a book about hand-me-downs, and then watch a frown come over the faces of Chinese manufacturers and Madison Avenue ad-men, who can no longer convince you that a thousand dollar new wardrobe is needed each fall.
     The simple rule, from iPods to computers to clothes, to music...if you pay for it, YOU OWN IT AND CONTROL ITS USE. If you kid want to own something, sit him or her down and to write out on a sheet of notebook paper...J...O...B.. then explain some of the economic realities surrounding this strange new term. It wouldn't hurt, during the lecture, if you mentioned that this "Job door" is one a kid must go eventually through in order to become a man. And try to make that sound like a good thing, not something to dread....you know, job equals freedom, equals not having to clean the room or make up the bed, equals staying up past eleven, equals pizza every night for supper, with ice cream dessert. And in truth, during their trek through the valley of the shadow this is exactly how they will live. By the time they graduate, and if they have been able to think critically, which means they will have avoided all the Leftie profs of campus (critical thinking to a college professor is like a cross to a vampire), once on the other side all the rules and regimens you imposed on them as a kid will begin to make sense, and they will miraculously learn to make a budget, and start eating vegetables. It's a mystery, I know. Again, the best time to start them on these little pep talks is around 3rd or 4th grade. But they must come from you.

     So, if you are going to fight back begin by re-asserting control over your House, and especially begin to augment (actually supersede) things your child is taught "out there" in the public square and schools. Trust me, everyone will notice. Both your neighbors and the Bad guys. You see, they've been paying attention to you and your House for years. Be prepared for a counter-attack or a siege. They have many tools in their inventory, and all you have, other than a stiffer spine, is the support of your neighbors and your God, however you conceive him to be. They know how you will react and have plans already drafted as to counter your attacks. They know you will stay within your box. You are predictable. You will come to a PTA meeting and squawk, you will write letters, emails, phone your Congressman, councilman or school administrator. You will vote. But you will stay within the rules and within your box.
     Because they won't, they believe, as we are seeing now, they will beat you every time. Today, I heard a very passionate, angry and frightened woman speak of the health care plan, and how it would destroy the life she wanted to build for her family...then, say, she would have to go along with it because it would guarantee her children health care.
    Had you listened to this you would have felt her anger and anxiety. But all a Leftie would hear, or wanted to hear, is that she would surrender anyway. That's all they want. Your anguish means nothing to them. As Stalin probably thought a million times, "This too will pass."
      In this I have laid out a daunting task for the individual mother and father, trying to win this current battle against socialism by rescuing the Constitution, then doing the hard work, and laying the groundwork for the next generration to follow, to scale back the institutions that aligned against your freedom, and to begin taking back the culture, one House at a time.
      But the size and manifest designs of the Enemy are such that there are things you cannot do, for 1) you are too few and 2) you are too poor.

Recapturing the Culture: In the Streets
      One of Moses Sands favorite anecdotes was of his mother, when she saw a villainous man approaching her in Main Street, she would suddenly dart off down a side alley, saying as she walked "Get thee behind me, Satan."
      There's something wrong with that picture, isn't it? Free men do not have to be free in secret. In fact, they cannot. As the target of the Left, you cannot simply barricade yourself in your House, and pretend you are free, when the Enemey owns the public highway.
      You have to take it back, and before I proceed any further, let me tell you, even under the most auspicious of circumstances, it will take at least forty years, two generations to take back the public street.
     This brings me to a subject we've written about for a long time, a hard subject, for we can't say out loud entirely what needs to be said.
Our anguish is at "conservatives in power", from radio to the internet, to the GOP, who refuse to step outside their rice bowls to begin bringing down the thunder on the Left. By refusing to do so, in a way, they have become just as predictable as that passionate, sad woman. As long as they stay inside their box, the Left believes they can control them. Indeed, they probably can.
    Most people believe that we (the People) will get even in 2010, and again in 2012. Let's pray they are right. But our view here is that many talking heads have to believe this 2010 Day of Reckoning scenario because to think otherwise would mean they would have to step outside their box to remain relevant. To date, only Glenn Beck has done this, and with him, only one foot. (He has way too many irrelevant fingers in the fire for the Left to take him all that seriously. An irritant, at best.)
     What we continue to say, What you need, and what we've been begging conservatives around the country to develop, is an equalizer.
     Here, I have to be very general and proprietary here, and quite frankly, just plain cautious, but for years, in every city and town of note in America, the Left has operated small cells of what essentially are watchers and fact gatherers, people who can, if it is decided they are needed, can summon all sorts of outside support. They are the invisible support system that stands behind that teacher who teaches her children to pray to Obama, or the frightened (or simpatico) school administrator who allows or at least does nothing to intercede or punish the conduct.
    In the modern sense, they are doing nothing illegal, and in the simplest sense, many don't even know they are working for a "higher" cause, or are being handled at all.
    It's not for you to know who are mere useful-idiot cannon fodder to the Left's plans, and who are active soldiers and capos. But it is for the conservative constitutional movement to know.
    We've written about Agitprop elsewhere on this blog, but in essence it's primary function is to find out things about the Left's activities in your town, and inside your institutions, then pass that news onto yourselves as parents, citizens, or, where political action is required, to a political action group. This can be done in several discreet ways, for maintaining the covert nature of the informants here is important, especially since the Left won't know either...and stuff like that really drives them batty.
    But there are also more pro-active projects an Agitprop unit can carry out, such as finding ways in the local popular culture to re-instill conservative and cultural virtues into the common society, especially the youth. These can be done with signage, free advertising, as with t-shirts, even music (I'll be posting a piece on a passive popular revolt in Korea I witnessed in the 1970s). There are so many ways. And they are all positive injections of virtue and real hope into a subculture that has turned dark and self-destructive.
    Then there is also the guardian function, which I consider important. It is when our side actually actually making the bad guys pay. For instance, there has been this spate of school videos of children chanting, singing and even praying to Obama. This is expressly illegal in every jurisdiction I know, and exposure seems to insure the practice is stopped. Or is it? When students were taping inflammatory lectures by college professors against George W Bush...especially when the class was supposed to be about geography...they simply stopped allowing tape recorders into the classrooms.
    There was no interdiction. There was no punishment. of the offending professors.
    The same thing is occurring in certain schools now, where teachers are doing what they are doing because they think they are immune from any counter-action. Many school administrators OK, and protect these illegal activities with the same though in mind, "Nothing can happen to me except being called on the carpet by the State Board of Education. I'm immune."
    There are dozens of ways (harmless and legal) to humiliate, embarrass and punish such wayward conduct. And yes, this has a chilling effect...only not of free speech, but illegal and dishonest behavior. If they can do it to AIG officers for getting a too big a paycheck, we can Andy-by-God-Jackson return the favor.
    And consider how quickly a truck load of cow dung would've found its way onto Rep Alan Grayson's car after he made those defamatory remarks about Republicans wishing old folks dead...especially in the middle of a campaign by the democrats to euthanize them. (More on that later, but it's pretty obvious, in order to pay for the medical care of the about-to-retire Baby Boomers, history's largest generation, a type of governmental triage will have to take place, in which old folks will be the odd man and woman out.) How to make them pay?
    We need the Rush Limbaughs and Ann Coulters and the various conservative foundations who have no problem spending millions on education, which while noble, seems to be going nowhere, and turn that money into action.
    And now, not November, 2010, when we learn that ACORN hasn't been rendered impotent after all.
    I will go no further on this point except to say that locally created and fully-"missioned" operations for a city of 20,000 should run $150,000-$200,000 for starters.  I say "for starters", since, once set up, they should be able to get local money in order to do all sorts of things.   
    A Congressional district of 700,000 should have at least three such units, with multiple capabilities, and I've been asking the political parties why they haven't done this already. (Maybe they have.) This is to allow citizens with deeper pocketbooks to become involved while maintaining a discreet arms-length distance from the notoriety of a real on-the-ground operations team.
    Ordinary citizens can probably set a seedling started with about $50,000 in pledges, but in our view, $150,000 is a minimum requirement for a fully functioning ops unit.
    Simply stated, this is an aspect of the war you can't fight individually, in a small groups, or out in the open.
    We believe that the one thing the Left cannot parry are attacks coming from outside the box. We are just as artistic and twice as clever...after all, we built a nation...while they've only plucked our fruit off the trees...so where's our art, our music, our film?
    We believe the Left cannot sleep at night knowing we are out there in the dark, lurking, ready to pounce. If there isn't a meeting they can break up, or an office they can storm, they are helpless. As I said a long time ago, public officials, from congressmen to county registrars to elementary school teachers need to feel our warm breath on their necks every waking minute. They need to start looking for back street routes to work. They need to garage the Volvo or SUV and look into driving '96 Ford Probes so no one will notice them. They need to have to learn to sneak into and out of work, and on to their dachas in the country, just like the commissars in the USSR did in the late 80's when the people finally caught onto what they were doing.
    They need to feel what it's like to be besieged. And they need to feel fear, so that every time a door is slammed closed or metal pan is dropped, they soil themselves.
   
Vassar Bushmills.

Portland, 2 Oct 2009
        Chicago's failure to get the Olympics for Chicago in 2016 was a big rebuff of President Barack Obama on the world stage. The Obama media will try mightily to spin this defeat into a tie, and maybe even a win, but no matter. When Rush Limbaugh squeals with glee and MSNBC and CNN moan in dirge-like concert, it's a loss.
        I'll leave the chatter on that loss to others.
        But the other big loss was the bold and blatant manner Obama tried to Yankee Big Stick this victory for Chicago over an entire continent Obama has spent months telling the ways of Big Stick Yankee diplomacy with their Latin neighbors to the south is over. Hell, even LBJ had the good sense to try to sneak in the back door when doing a deal like this against Latin interests.
        Make no bones about it...the Rio Olympics in 2016, the first ever in South America, is the South American Olympics. Every swinging Ricardo from Juarez to Terra del Fuego will gleam with pride when that flame is lit. As well they should. Well done. 'Bout time.
        But since early in the week, when OB1 announced his decision to fly to Copenhagen, Latins began to ask themselves, "Who is this Black Gringo? Really?"
Bernard Chumm
       
       

     Dear Neil:
            I just watched you roundtable about capitalism, "Did We Ask for it?, re the Pittsburgh G20 conference.
            We've been pleading this case for years: Drop the term "capitalism" as it means something entirely different in America than it ever did in Europe, from whence comes almost all our left wing political attitudes.
            Try this. Add one modifier, and one substitution and tell me if you would get the same result from that bunch of screaming ninnies, the Hole in the Soul Gang, running around tearing up things.
            Instead of calling it "capitalism", call it unfettered capitalism. Instead of calling it "capitalism" call it "free markets".
            You will never see those mobs riot against "free markets". Nor will you ever see them riot against "unfettered capitalism", as all they will do is stand scratching their heads, "Huh?"
            Unfettered capitalism always ends up "state-protected" capitalism, while free markets are constitutionally protected capitalism. One favors "big" at the expense of "small" while other favors "small" at the expense of "big". Unfettered capitalism moves toward monopoly while free markets always move alongside competition.
           It was always the great irony of Karl Marx that the system he most hated is also most favored by the ideological system he created, a monopolistic system of production, whether communist or fascist.
           So, when you dedicate an entire show to that term, you are playing a hand dealt by the Left.
VB

Richmond, 26 September, 2009
             
              Many years ago there appeared a book by Thomas Cahill entitled How the Irish Saved Civilization. A compelling argument, but also a reminder of just how long civilization requires to re-emerge after being overrun by barbarism. Approximately a thousand years.
              Today France and Russia stands uniquely poised to do the same thing, save civilization, and of the two, I select Nicholas Sarkozy of France.
              (I can't believe I just wrote that...France.)
              Early in the week President Barack Obama stood before the United Nations and abdicated America's role as leader of the Free World. Indeed, he more or less declared it dead. He denied America's role as defender of the poor, the down trodden, the set-upon...assuming that no one would step forward to replace us. His vision, I am quite certain, is of a world of equals in which he, like Citizen Robespierre, would be just a tad more equal than others. Obama dreams of charade and expects the rest of the world to play along.
             Then, three days later (yesterday) he strode across a stage, with the leaders of France and England in tow, to announce that only now had he discovered that there is gambling in Casablanca, and the world is shocked and outraged. (Leaks as to who knew what and when and was first in knowing about Iran's secret nuclear processing facility to follow.) Then followed the predictable threats of stern sanctions...although by who...the UN?, these three? others? remain undisclosed. The world has seen this before and has no reason to take threats from one and a quarter penises very seriously.
             So now comes some sort of December deadline at which time Iran must open its doors and the United Nations and IAEA can once again parade its own useful idiots through the turnstile to reassure us that they (the United Nations) are doing everything that can possibly be done to protect the peace and insure its doctrine of fairness, which covers every country on the planet...save one. We've been down this path before, also.
            Speaking of that lone pirate nation, whose own unshared intelligence also knew of this nuclear facility, just how long will Israel wait? That's the question everyone is asking. It's clear everyone expects them to do something...first. That's the stage Mr Obama seems to be setting. It's equally clear the United Nations has always wanted Israel to do what it hasn't the political will to do, and that is to end this nuclear nightmare in a flash, rather than through sanctions followed by another corrupt Oil for Food Program. It's a sucker play, for a peremptory Israeli  air strike would allow the UN to breathe a sigh of relief that Iran's nuclear ambition has been set back at least a decade or more, while actually being able to beat Israel up even more for its piratical ways of blowing the place up.
            I am quite sure, in this scenario, there will even be a place for President Obama to do a cameo and take a bow.  

            All that said, imagine a brave new world where one of the "other" major nations decides to take bold unilateral action and take out Iran's nuclear capability. Only France and Russia fill that bill right now...since there are no men at 10 Downing Street at the present time.
            And of the two, only France could do it for the glory (and other existential considerations), without demanding more tangible reimbursements.
            The result? Omigod!. Imagine.
            Israel gets what it wants while being spared one more outrage from the world community. The United Nations gets what it wants in the sense that a non-cowboy nation committed this deed while sparing them the humiliation that normally comes just by showing up for work each day. The Islamo-fascist world gets a long overdue warning...and spanking.
            Even the United States wins in that our talkative retreat-prone president gets a real lesson in real politik...that no vacuum goes unfilled. If the United States wants to abdicate leadership, someone will step in to replace us...and as long as Nicholas Sarkozy is that man....
            Amen. Insha'allah.
Vassar

Richmond, September 25, 2009
             
                  We've all done the math. Even if every Republican had their John Madden "Lineman of the Year" face on...you know, snot bubbles and drool running out of the side of their mouths...even if every Republican said not only "No" but "Hell no"...even if every Republican said about Reid and Pelosi and Obama in front a mic what Joe Wilson blurted out offstage last week, there still wouldn't be enough votes to stop this health care bill in any form.
                  We deal in Agritprop here, where sneaking up and tweaking genuinely dishonest people and their cohorts is part of our trade. But how do you reach inside the heart and soul of a man, a good honest man, who has been trapped by his own vanity?
                  That can only be done close up, face to face, mano y mano.

                  If in fact, as some argue, the Democrat Party has become soulless, and there is no honor there any longer, then nothing I have to say here will matter. But I believe there are many Democrats, even old style Liberals, who have been trapped by their own vanities, the worst being having to admit you have sided with out-and-out criminals and mountebanks, and worse, facsist thugs.
                  Who, in a theatre where illuminated vanity is everything, can ever admit that? Who can say, by word or deed, or vote, that they were hornswoggled, lied to and cheated?
                  Better to ride it out, or go down with the ship, eh? Can you imagine some of the things the "secretly honest" liberals are saying to themselves every morning in the mirror? The little devil on the left shoulder will say, "Well, the country will be better off if I try to work from the inside, within the system"...while the little angel on the right will whisper "Yeah, whatever system it finally turns out to be. Be prepared to hang with them, so get a lawyer."

                 I can't say how many Democrats go through this daily soul-searching, except to say I'm fairly certain Arlen Specter isn't one of them. Or Jack Murtha.
                 All I can say, as Glenn Beck intones daily, pray for them. Pray that just a few, a redeemed few, a "happy few", will actually see and understand the nature of that hole they are drilling into the hull of what had once been the most seaworthy ship ever to float.
                 As for the Republicans, if this bill is passed, we don't need you anymore. Your only responsibility, and only path to redemption will be to place the mark of anathema on every single person who votes for this bill, in both chambers, and to forswear any and all personal and social contact with that person, from the simplest "Good Morning" or "Excuse Me", except as required by law and the rules of the Chamber.
                Either that or get out...and get a lawyer.
VB
                 

                 

Richmond, September 24, 2009

     Once again I remind you. As you  raise the pitch, and call down the thunder...
     As you repel everything they try...
     As you just say "No. No, No"...
     As you push back, and they begin to give, then move back, then retreat...
     As they know you will not quit...
     It will be they who will fire the first shot.
     Watch and wait.
VB

 Portland, Sept 23, 2009
     Leader of the Free World....my sister's black cat's patoot.
     At this writing, there no longer is a Free World...our former role abdicated today so that the United States would join the rest of world's petty potentates and poppinjays, as only it's largest and most powerful member, headed by the posing peacock and popinjay in chief.

     I believe it is time to begin considering the "M" word...
     megalomania.
Bernard Chumm

     At some point our Rebellion may succeed in throwing the scalawags out of Congress, and hopefully we will get to snidely smirk as we watch a few of them marched off to be arraigned. We may even get a repeat in 2012, watching an army of administration insiders limp away with their tails between their legs.
     What then? Have you considered next steps?
      In 1992 we sent a bunch of fresh faces to Washington, then turned and walked away, and very shortly, many of them had become just like "them". So, have you ever considered things you not only have to continue doing until the day you die, but must now also pass on to the next generation?
     Have you all considered these things? There can be no respite, no rest, until the day you die. What you (we) have undertaken will be central to your lives from now on. It is that kind of war...and not just the memory, but the severity and peril must never fade.

     But also consider this. At some point our Rebellion may fail miserably and utterly. I can think of many ways this can happen, so where that fire that now burns white hot in your belly must be banked so as to continue to burn even if we lose, but also must be hidden from view...as millions of Iranians have had to do the past thirty years. Think about it.
     Everyone remembers the Boston Tea Party, but can anyone recall the Boston Massacre? Think Tian-an-men Square. Look it up. The other side has the manpower, the guns, and if they want to do it, can make the law into any sort of weapon they desire, turning what you think now to be a patriotic act into a crime. I have no doubt theat when pressed up against the wall, when they start to lose but still have power over government, they will try some awful stunts.
     So you have to be sure of yourself, for, as I cited Steve McQueen earlier, "You've never played the game until you have played for more than you can afford to lose."
     You can also self-destruct from internal bickering and disputes, as I lined out in Part II. The first tests of that will occur soon, as you will have to decide what political shape the Movement will take. Right now we are an unofficial adjunct of the Republican Party, inasmuch as we are pursuing principles they have espoused for many years...though rarely fought for, also for many years. The GOP has not yet decided whether to reach out and accept paternity for us, little b**stards that we are (and they utter under their breath). Nor have we fully decided we want to accept back into our family that man who drove off to Washington one day, leaving momma on the front porch, barefoot and pregnant, promising to come back, but instead falling in with the bright lights and brothels of the big city. Daddy, we hardly knew ye.
     And then there's all those Sugar Daddy Warbucks who have spent so much money making our little Rebellion possible, with all the stagecraft, sexy websites and fireworks. How beholding are we to them? Or them to us?
     How many of them actually have their sight on the same prize we do?
     That's the politics of it. It seems to never stop...at the same time it seems never to fix...correction, promises to never fix anything.
     In this, Part III and in Part IV I will line out things we have to do no matter what, win, lose or draw in the political arena.

     As I wrote earlier, there are three phases to the Rebellion: the political, the institutional the culture. Top to bottom politics is corrupt, in part because 1) men are corrupt when they get too close to power for too long, but also because of all those little fat, greedy mouths they have to feed in the institutions, who in exchange, keep them in power (and also keep the culture in decline).
     The culture, if you're looking for a definition, is the soul of the people. Just as in everything, there are good souls and there are bad ones. Ours is becoming, in fact, at one generational level, has become almost rotten to the core. We have to fix this. And we have to fix it without tossing out the Constitution with the bath water.
     You can analyze this yourself, or take my word for it, but a rotten culture eventually has to be tied to a leash and led around like a dog, which, while you make this out to be a bad thing, suits the people owning the leash business just fine. A moral culture on the other hand can roam freely. It's that simple. The rottenness found in our culture today was put there on purpose, therefore you can see this relationship between the political, the institutional and the culture.
     Retaking the culture is our end-game, for only then will we be worthy of the faith and privilege the Constitution placed in our hands almost 225 years ago. I'll discuss how that can be done also in Part IV, but you can also see how the Politics is the lynchpin, for without controlling the political landscape we double the time and manpower in reigning in the institutions that are making war on our households and and freedom. Just go to East Europe, and look at the cultural slide after the Communists took over in 1944. They held onto enough to eventually run off the Communists, but after 50 years, most of the original culture, the original strength of the soul of the people had been lost. Twenty years later, free, they are still struggling to regain even a semblance of that moral center that defined them.
    The top three, in my estimation are 1) the power of the bureaucracies, 2) the power of public schools and universities and 3) the power of advertisers.
    The good news is, these are fights you don't have to march on Washington in order to make your case. These are fights that are fought best from the bottom up anyway, and to some extent, these are fights that can start simply by saying "No". Solzhenitsyn wrote about the "wrecking" of the great plans for agriculture reforms in the USSR under Stalin. It was true, what was once the bread basket of Europe in the days of the tsars (not to be confused with czars), had annual crop failures from 1919 until 1992. Stalin blamed counter-revolutionaries, "wreckers". But all it was was the people saying "no". For you see, the one power even the most tyrannized people have is to be able to deny their masters what they want. The Communists wanted total control, but if total control included bumper crops, they couldn't have it.
    Remember this law.
    
    Bureaucracy
    In January, Robert Hightower, one of our partners, wrote a piece on the "Front Office vs the Front Lines". He is our "Bureaucracy-buster".  He described bureaucracies, even in the best of run private companies, as cancers, requiring constant vigilance and treatment. Miss one dose and the cancer spreads.
    From the constitutional standpoint, controlling bureaucracy is an issue of size, and political will. The people can rarely affect bureaucracies directly, but rather must require their elected officials to do this for them...for the first mission, the Prime Directive of Bureaucracies, is to secure their seat at the dinner table. (I'll bet you thought it was getting medical care to to infirm, or medicine to the elderly, or building highways in Vermont. Hah!)
    There are several rules about bureaucracies you should know, and I recommend you visit our other essays and learn them. They figure in, and exacerbate, just about every political ailment known to man, since the third millenia BCE. To the extent "bureaucratism" could be cured, constitutional democracy in the public sector and free market competition in the private, is about as close as you could get. Bureaucracies feed on the Left in public sector just as they do on inefficiency and redundancy in the private, for the Left sees their bureaucracies as the primary jobs sector, "their" job sector.
    But both require extreme vigilance, which in the political sphere we stopped watching years ago, while in the private sector, in the specter of Big Business, has come back to bite us big time....for you see, either way, it is us, taxpayers and consumers who pay for their waste. And if you want to know why mom's can't stay at home instead of work even if they want to, like it used to be on black and white television shows, it's because of that waste, and the high taxes we must pay to support it....and the power advertisers have over our children.
    The main rule you have to understand is that they don't care about you, the taxpayer, the guy who pays their bills, fills their rice bowl. Remind me to write an essay about the evil that is indifference, but it is one of the guiding rules of bureaucracies:  They care about your rice bowl, their place at the trough. They care not one whit about the people who prepare that place for them. In fact, they look down your nose at taxpayers.
     Bureaucracies, in government at every level, and Big Business are filled with redundancies...in other words, two people in two different offices doing essentially the same work, only for a different boss or agency, or according to a different enabling act of the legislature...since the guys who wrote it forgot someone was already doing it. Usually they fill out forms and count stuff, and pass the forms onto the next guy, who double checks the work, then puts his signature on it as well...only, if it's something serious, every one of those signatories have to send the paper back down the ladder for further explanation, which is a sort of CYA, and which may eventually mean the paper will never get to its final destination or will find a circuitous route, so that if anything ever does go wrong, it will be that poor schlub back at the beginning who gets fired. After WWII, when they hung so many Nazis, many of those men who stood on the scaffold and stared Eternity in the face, did so cursing that one signature that sent that one carload of Jews one step closer to the rail yards.
    Bureaucrats are risk averse.
    Once upon a time the way you controlled this was by simply denying your own congressman or other elected representative the right to send these people your money. FDR stopped a lot of that, and indeed, after 1933, not only Washington DC, but every state capital who had to deal with the New Deal, found both depression and bureaucracy to be very profitable. Even today, as I write this, we have lost almost 2.4 million jobs, yet the government is claiming nearly a million jobs saved or gained from the "stimulus". No one to my knowledge is pointing out the simple fact that those 2.4 million lost jobs are all private sector while those saved/gained jobs are public sector.
    See how this game works? Virginia right now is boasting that its unemployment rate is going down, not up.
    Today, federally mandated and funded bureaucratism has crept down to the tiniest city council, where, just fifty years ago, the only federal employee ran the post office.
What to do.
    So today, you have to form a shadow government in your town, your district, your state so as to decide just what services, and at what cost, you believe your little part of this democracy can abide. (The first two people I want to get rid of are those two sheriff's deputies who take my pocket knife away from me every time I enter the courthouse. I've been through a dozen this year.) Most standing politicians will not go along with you, so you have to form your own ticket, and find your own candidate.
    (You will have to do pretty much the same thing with your schools, so get ready for some long hours of work.)
    From these slates of candidates, within eight years, will arise some very important state and national leaders. This is how Sara Palin rose.
    The major point is, no matter how you arrive at the formula, your elected official has to know his/her job depends on reducing the size of government, both in terms of structure and mission, and the size of its budget. Start at 25%, and as my friend Mr Hightower wrote, make sure it is the paperhangers in the front office and not the people in the front lines who feel the pinch.

    The Public Schools
    In theory we defend home schooling, but it has always been a great sadness that we are willing to walk away from what once was the finest public school system in the world. And the reason it was the finest was because of local control. The Left long ago understood the power of state textbook commissions, for instance...while we slept. That garbage your children is taught didn't get there by accident.
    You have to reacquire that power, which even in the best of circumstances, would have been a fight lasting many years. And you have to look beyond the time your own kid is in school. Public schools ain't Little League baseball. It's your country's future.
    I will not tell you here my opinions about dress code, corporal punishment, busing, private automobiles, school uniforms. I will simply say there is much that is being taught in public school that should not be taught at all. There is also much that is being taught the wrong way, with the wrong emphasis. Among these, especially, are American Government and American History. Both need to taught with enthusiasm (which would require the firing of many teachers straightaway) and with a view toward American exceptionalism, and American heroes.
    Kids relate to heroes at about fourth grade. So start then, and build up. If George Washington slept around, let them find that out in college. What they need to know early on is how to discern the difference between a lie, a smear and a fact. They need to see the perosnal virtues of the founders reflected in the virtue of the country as a whole.
    In all cases, what is taught in schools should augment what has already been taught at home..and by "at home" I mean most homes. The entire school system should not be required to stand on it's head because one parent is abusive, an atheist, or offended. The school system should reflect the standards of the community at large, and hopefully our finer elements. So black lipstick just may be out this year in East Kentucky.
    In the 1930s our school systems "forced" certain American values down the throats of kids, from backward Appalachia to immigrant- ridden St Louis to segregated Columbia, Tennessee. Black students in 1955 received demonstrably better public educations than they do now, in any public school, and the question needs to asked "Why?". Segregation was not the answer, so look for the others. Reverse engineer that whole process. In my view, segregation notwithstanding, public schools went from demanding "you can" from its students, to "you can't". That's "leftism", not racism. Instead of teaching those children to hate the white George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, teach them to hate what has been done to them by their government the past forty years...for it indeed has been hateful...and criminal.
    I'm getting into proprietary areas here, for we are involved in counseling, curricula and cultural issues, both from the position of being (back) in political power and from the opposite position should the new national police come crashing through your front door with a battering ram, and we have to take this theme covert.
    Our main point here is, you can't just win in 2010 or 2012 then walk away. You have to know "they" won't quit until one of you is completed defeated, so you can't quit either. Sorry, that's the hand you've been dealt, so you have to play it.
    Or fold.

   Public Universities
   Dittos to what I just said about K-thru-12 public schools, only to add that the high cost, the criminally high cost of public education is a reflection of our health care problem. The reason $29 textbooks cost $125, and have to be revised every three years, killing off the used book market, is the same as that $29 aspirin at the hospital...just substitute "subsidy student loans" for "insurance company".
   Moreover, fully a third of most university academic programs is designed to regenerate itself and grow. Any decent analyst can come up with a 1-, 5- and 10-year forecast for the nation's needs in historians at the university, high school and middle school levels. For super specialized studies, such as the History of Pre-Columbian Sheep Shelter Furnishings in the Ozarks, let Professor Gardiner at SE Missouri State choose his own successor.
    When college programs graduate students at a 2:1-3:1 ratio to available jobs in a particular field we have a problem. And not just because of the disgruntled two thirds who end up at Best Buy, Hooters or answering the phone at Dewey, Scoogem and Howe. Besides, all the Women's Studies grads who chose not to go after their masters degree already have those receptionist jobs in tow.
    The tendency is to expand the university itself to accommodate the overage, and the way they do this is by tapping out the best of the lot and move into graduate programs. Those grads in turn will then go on to newly created position and departments in yet another university, bumping up that state's education budget. see how it works?
    We believe the people should cause the curricula to be revisited, with a view of creating a core curricula, based on what was taught 1900-1960. Yes, that means Western Civilization is back, Samoan Civilization is out. University budget priorities should be directed toward this core, from whence come jobs and the old ideal of the "better man and woman". Colleges and universities can be cut by 25% easily, and the degrees they pass out at the bachelor's level have become so meaningless that truly, a degree is worth little more than a diploma...except that a lot of educational bureaucrats got richer along the way.
    Finally, in every area of academe K-PhD, there is the problem of the "outlaw" teacher, professor, and sometimes even entire department. There are things citizens can do to cast a chilling effect on this conduct. All legal, mind you, but things that will certainly make them think twice about repeat performances. And yes, there is a little reverse engineering of Alinksy's Rules for Radicals, in that's how they spot us and make our lives miserable. But it's also the way the Commies took care of business when they were in charge in  the Eastern Bloc...identify, isolate, prosecute and persecute. They could be clever to the point of being artistic. We know how.
    I've asked Bernie to work up a single article on this subject, the outlaw teacher, to appear soon, but much of what we have to say as to specific tactics, well, we can't say. That's how we make money, since, for a few hundred bucks, instead of hiring Vinnie and Augie with baseball bats, you hire us to bust their shins legally.

    You'll note I've said very little about the unions, at either the high school or university level. But they are your chief adversary. At the local level they will fight back, and fight hard. They will know you by name...so learn theirs. It will get personal. It will get mean.
    The way to beat them is by beating the drums about things that are really above their pay grade. If the people of Iowa decide Women's Studies don't fit into the plans of higher education, it is none of their concern (only we all know that it is). That is a political issue decided by legislators and the people.
    You way you defeat the unions is to beat down "their soldiers in your emply", i.e., the legislators. (This is the one fight Ronald Reagan didn't want to take on in the '80s, and it was because the people were not yet on his side of the issue. Now we are.) If you squeeze or replace the legislators who conive with the unions, you will beat them.
    In twenty five years, if you are successful, there will be many books written as to how you did it...and a grateful nation will read them and learn.

Advertising
    I consider most forms of advertising protected speech, so there's the problem. Advertising works best with children, and they've been doing that since the radio shows in the 30s first began selling cereal to kids.
    What we all know is that advertising that doesn't work stops. Suddenly. Just like bad music. Since few kids actually work...cut grass, deliver papers...everthing kids buy, someone else pays for.
    Don't do that anymore. If you say "No", the advertising stops. Kids will be content to wear 4.99 T-shirts instead of 14.99 ones with a silhouette of a man and a basketball on it. I once asked a kid how much Nike was paying him to advertise their products. He looked at me dumbfounded.
    In any case, that logo cost about $10 on a crummy t-shirt, and the point is they marketed and advertyised that t-shirt to him, but you shelled out the money. If Nike were to remove the logo and simply put their label at the back of the collar, then sell the shirt at say 7.99, and then sell the logo as an iron-on at another $8, see how many kids would pay for the logo. You are the problem....for you are not teaching kids about the basics of economics and marketing, and the humiliation of being made a sucker.
    Advertising and marketing isn't so much about lies as it is in making you want somethign you don't need and often can't afford. It is about being suckered. In the end they know you will be willing to go into debt to get it. At that point advertising is a home invasion with a full seat at the dinner table, right next to car loan and home mortgage.
    You need counseling and therapy. Join a group. Form a group. Teach you kids and practice what you preach. Just as you demand of the schools, create a core budget of necessities, and ask you kids to do the same thing. Make it a routine thing...watch "I Remember Mama" (Irene Dunn). Teach your kids that saving, and building a nest egg, or delaying gratification are good things. Teach them these are things with which we build our House, and by "House" I mean the House of David Schmidlap, not a building.
    Teach them early enough and they will beam with pride, rather cower with embrassment, when they put that dollar back in their pocket,  turning down the offer the biggie-size the fries, instead putting that money in a mason jar at home.
    This is just one thing you can do, but just think of the collateral damage advertisers are doing to your House, because of the lack of a simple "no".

Vassar Bushmills
  
 


   

Portland, 22 Sept 2009

        Most people agree that "death by cynicism" is a type of murder. Bill Ayers, who can't be quoted on any subject without inserting a comment about the "murders" of the Nixon administration in SE Asia, is conspicuously quiet on this about to occur "murder" of American Marines and soldiers in Afghanistan.
        In March, the still-new President Obama  stated he had a solid new policy and strategy in place for Afghanistan, apparently referring to a counter-insurgency plan to be implemented by his new theater commander, Gen Stanley McChrystal.
       That was March, this is now September and Obama says we do not yet have a strategy, and he will consider a troop surge only after the direction and form of that strategy has been determined.
       ????
        In other words, Obama either lied in March, and never really had a strategy or the strategy he had then has failed. Either one is plausible. In fact, both could be true.
        What also has occured in that time frame is that Obama in March had a game plan in which his Health care plan would be law by the August recess, and therefore the Left would (cynically) give him all the rope (and troops) he wanted to finish up Afghanistan in the way he (cynically) promised the American people.
       Now in order to keep those on the Left in tow with a crumbling healthcare plan, Obama must (cynically) place not only the mission, but the lives and endeavors of the troops in Afghanistan on the back burner, possibly with a view toward ultimate surrender, retreat (pulling out), having all those lives lost in vain.
       As far as we are concerned at SICCM, the death of every Marine and soldier since March has been cynical murder.
       So, where's Bill Ayers?
BC

       Before he finally headed for the high country that last time in 2006, one of Moses Sands' greatest laments was the failure of conservatives (who he called "protectors" of the Constitution) to educate religious people (who most everyone calls "social conservatives" without any clear definition of just what that is) about the proper relationship between their faith and the Constitution.
       Of course this subject is about to come up again, as the Republican Party tries to sort out its intellectual, cultural and class differences (all pretty subjective) while standing athwart history in a struggle to defend against a very objective enemy, one whose object is to crush the Constitution to smithereens. Since time immemorial, when petty is easy and life-and-death choices hard, there is a class of people who will always choose petty. (Remind me to write about that sometime.)
       William Buckley stood in constant reminder to us that the intellectual arguments standing behind the "social conservatism" of the unlettered and untutored rubes in the rural south and west are far stronger than those adopted by their so-called betters in the suburbs and cities (especially on abortion), and he was just the person to articulate those arguments on behalf of the hicks.
       But as seen by the other side of the argument, the real debate was one of class, and WFB knew that as well.  So it was far easier for the country club set, especially in the sound byte lingo of the day, to define the social conservative as a Bible-thumping hayseed instead of an erudite Yale man whose family came to these shores when King George was still in knee pants...allowing them to keep the "debate" on their side of the fence stile, and intellectual egg off their face.
       But Moses said (more than once) that there is a streak of tyranny in all religions, and small town Baptists and Mormons, parish Catholics and even Scandinavian Lutherans in Minnesota were no exception.
       All religions, including Christianity, tend toward dictatorial control if given enough rope. For centuries the Catholic Church burned all sorts of people, from atheists to heretics to mere dissenters, all from the position of an almighty power it had no right to claim...and deep in its heart knew so. When resistance finally erupted on a large scale in the 16th Century, the fact that it (the Church) didn't erupt into even deeper paroxysms of violence was because of its own self-examination of those tenets of faith. The Church changed. The Church "surrendered" back again to its faith...leaving temporal power to temporal men whose church the head of which, as Mark Twain noted, always was and always will be Beelzebub.
      This is where we (conservatives) fight our battles.
      Other religions through history had been even less bending, possibly because there was no inner redemptive quality in their faiths. Who can say? Today, there is a keen intellectual argument as to whether such a quality exists within Islam. I believe there is, as did Moses Sands. But others disagree. For years, westerners have been waiting for the rise of an Islamic Martin Luther, or at least an Avicenna or Averroes, which would cause the struggle in Islam to turn inward, toward the soul, toward the more pure intentions of the Q'uran.
      But as it stands today, so far, the forces within Islam who have declared war on America are the unredeemed forces of tyranny, plain and simple.
      In America, embedded in the 10th Amendment are powers that to some of us seem near dictatorial, especially if you find yourself in central Kentucky on a Saturday night and learn that the nearest cold beer is 20 miles away, across the county line. At one time, local blue laws even kept the drug stores closed on Sundays. And while law (and better sense) may have finally allowed them to remain open, there is still that cadre of folks, mostly older, (and their children who never got too far way from the teat) who seethe at the idea that their "right of majority rule" to close any business on the Sabbath, their Sabbath, had been superseded by some federal judge in Montgomery.
      In truth, they probably couldn't get a majority vote on that issue any longer, for most people, including some very fine Christians, have found that store being open on Sunday to be a benefit, and actually causing no spiritual harm either...at least to the non-busybody segment of their Christian community.
      You see, somewhere along the line most American Christians find no profit in ordering by law non-Christians (of all types) to abide by a set of rules Christians could just as easily impose on themselves without benefit of ordinance or constables. As all conservatives know, that role of Busy-Body in Chief always falls to the government eventually, where it resides now.
      Nor is this common sensical, live-and-let-live approach found in all faiths and one must ask why?
      The modern Left reminds us that most every modern government is a government of busy-bodies. Many American Christians loved the 10th Amendment fifty years ago, for it was always seen as their license to order their local culture (majority rules). But like the Muslims they also see that same Bill of Rights to be a license to corrupt when placed in the wrong hands. So, even as a person in Murfreesboro will gnash her teeth that someone in Nashville will claim the right and power to dictate what she should put on their cereal each morning, the fact that she may feel no compunction whatsoever in deciding where someone else ought to be, or ought not be, on Sunday morning, is an issue conservatives need to take up with our religious base.
      For if you think southern Baptists are bad, try opening up an accounting office in Show Low, Arizona, while also practicing the religion of  being a "Gentile".
      People are just funny that way.
 
      As I have often written, my mother was one of those people who believed that the local sheriff should go around every Sunday morning and haul out every man and woman still in bed and cart them off to church, or, if they choose, to some sort of community service...that did not involve labor, being the Sabbath and all.
     Still, she would never have rounded up a bunch of men and women and done it herself.
     My mother wanted the law to do it.
    And by inviting the law to do so, just ask any black American who can remember the old south just fifty years ago, she and her fellow Christians damn near destroyed the 10th Amendment...never knowing that today it, along with a new alliance with black people who find themselves enslaved now because of its absence...may well be their only rescue line.

    The question you on the outside looking in should ask, why is it that Christians, when they were all powerful, only shunned and ostracized, and passed local ordinances that favored their particular religious beliefs? If they were so dictatorial and invasive, why didn't they just barge though Clyde Barr's door when he beat his wife, then drag that drunk out and beat him until he repented? Why didn't they just take Lila Cornet out, who cheated on her husband, and stone her? Even the KKK wore hoods to signify that they were stepping outside the law.
    Imagine the Jewish and Muslim women who have been stoned, or the many Hester Prynne's who would have given worlds to get the cold shoulder, and nothing more, at Walgreens while buying condoms for Bruno. If Christianity were truly the tyrannical evil they say it is, there would never have been any need for a Klu Klux Klan. The local folk, through ordinance, could simply have sent the local sheriff and his deputies to talk to the pagan Asian or Jew who worshiped on Saturday and worked on Sunday, or the ignorant and backward (no doubt Yankee) white person who felt it was perfectly permissible to invite a nigra up on the front porch for lemonade and cookies. Why the need for disguise?
    Because the United States Constitution, from the very beginning, implanted a respect for law that superseded even the most basic religious faith, that's why. There were lines Christians would not cross which other religions will. For a century Muslims have come here and lived in peace, and secretly breated deep sighs of relief that so many of the harsher aspects of shari'a law did not have to be invoked...nor was there any power to order it so. This was how it was until the Wahhabi's began sponsoring mosques and madrassas, and the general rise of militant Islam associated with those teaching.
   As Europe may find out sooner than us, liberty and freedom of choice cannot co-exist with this strand of Islam.
   And there were lines which Christians would not cross that government most certianly will...and which seem to be aimed at the very Christians who first began the practice of passing off to the local sheriff (and child welfare agency and county attorney) the power to do to people what a nice cold shoulder could have done.
    There is an irony here. And like any sin, you really can't find release and redemption until you fully confess it. The small, "parochial" religious communities of America are now under assault...by the state, by the atheistic socialists, and by the class-minded members of their own party...using the tools they first brought into play during Jim Crow and hid under the sweet innocent name of "states rights".
    No one will take their pleas for rescue by the 10th Amendment seriously until they are prostrated at the foot of the sins they committed under it, for no one fully believes they won't just go right back to being petty tyrants in their towns once the pain has been relieved.
    Conservatism has to meet this head on...for the revival of the 10th Amendment is one of the major wedges we can use to get the black family to our side. It is also the one major way to remove populist appeals to a darker nature (read local race-and-religion baiting) as we saw in the 2008 GOP campaign. We are completely in favor of re-introducing God and prayer into the classroom. The recent rap-murders in Farmville Virginia remind us why this is so important. We are in favor of strengthening divorce laws, making it harder to get one, but also for strengthening marriage laws, making it harder to get one of those as well. And personally, I find a certain quaintness and innocence that a country should decide not to allow the sale of alcohol beverages, just as I find it legal (but not so quaint) that a California town can ban the sale of tobacco. (Just stay away from our guns!)
Vassar Bushmills