Category → Government Of the People…
Is censorship American?
Wasn’t calling someone a “censor” one of the worst things you could do, way back when?
After all, the First Amendment to the US Constitution prohibits infringements of free speech, guaranteeing to all citizens the right to speak our minds.
Enter the mainstream media, captured by one political party since the 1960s and now an unabashed arm of that single political party.
For so long has the mainstream media been an integral part of just one political party and its agenda, an orthodox culture has developed around it.
Deviation from the script, the narrative, the talking points of that orthodoxy and media results in huge amounts of flame, vituperation, scalding attacks. Even worse, two generations of Americans have not been taught critical thinking skills. Oh, that narrative is drilled into their heads by the media, Hollywood, their high school teachers and college lecturers. But the ability to discern correct from incorrect, false from true, accurate from inaccurate is a skill that has been purposefully cast aside.
Now that the media has been thwarted and bypassed by alternative modes of communication, the ultimate result being the election of Donald Trump to the presidency, a new effort is under way to reestablish control over the information flow. Information must flow with the orthodoxy, the narrative, the agenda. So when new voices, critical thinking voices, bubble up from the huddled masses and serfs below, the media strikes back.
“Fake news,” is what the media calls irony, sarcasm, and also honest, factual reporting that does not fit with the media’s established agenda. Now FakeBook is working hard with a cadre of “fact checkers” funded by billionaire anti-American activist George Soros and staffed by hardened politicos, to censor news and information that does not fit the agenda.
Even the ACLU has embraced this move to shape public opinion. Once upon a time, the ACLU was against censorship, but now that power and control might be lost to the exercise of free speech, even that once vaunted group has thrown in with the censors. We cannot have those puny serfs making up their own informed minds!
Is it American to be a censor, to censor what people can read, or to block or shape what information Americans can obtain? I don’t think so. I believe it is fundamentally un-American. The great irony of all this is that the LA Times, the Washington Post, New York Times, NBC, CBS, BBC, NPR et al all routinely publish news and information that can only be called fake. This information is grossly inaccurate and at best a misrepresentation of some fact the media do not like.
Who would have thought that in 2017, the protected establishment media would be seeking ways to silence alternative sources of information, so that they can maintain their hegemony over the flow of information, ideas, and public opinion?
Among some Americans today, being a censor is the proudest thing they can be, and that is sad. How do we get our nation back?
The Sad Situation in Standing Rock
A person must be cold blooded to not at least feel sad for the Standing Rock folks.
This is a group of ancient people who have watched their culture, lifestyle, property, and land heritage melt away under the weight of newer tribes. They really don’t have much left, and now a pipeline threatens to take away even more.
The Dakota Access pipeline is important, heck, all the new pipelines are important because energy independence is critical to American political independence. The more America can rely on domestic energy, the less we need foreign sources of energy. The less we depend on those foreign sources, the freer we are to make tough but necessary decisions about domestic and foreign policy.
What saddens me is the win-lose situation in Standing Rock. The pipeline is presented as a take-it-or-leave-it outcome. Surely there is some other way to resolve this, other than ramming it through. After all, that has been a hallmark of the failed Obama administration and their legislative allies on so many other policy fronts, ramming decisions down everyone’s throats. It is a negative way to run government. It unnecessarily creates winners and losers.
Creating winners and losers is a recipe for serious problems down the road. Resentment runs deep. Grudges are created. Losses are forever mourned.
I know from experience that the Standing Rock situation presents us with an opportunity to create winners and winners.
How well do I recall sitting in a conference room at my office in downtown Harrisburg in 2001. Gathered around the table were representatives from Audubon, Sierra Club, recreational ATV riders, hunters, trail hikers, and the timber industry.
I had successfully negotiated the purchase of a privately owned 12,500-acre inholding in the huge Sproul State Forest from the Litke family. Donna Litke was a neat Pennsylvanian who loved her family’s rugged wilderness land in the northcentral country, but who also had a fiduciary commitment to her family to get the best financial results possible from any purchase. Her private land would become public land after we acquired it.
But Everyone wanted the whole property for their own interests. Or they wanted to block their political opponents from getting something out of it.
After hearing all the crabbing from all sides, left and right, environmental groups and industry, I decided that we would not acquire the property unless everyone got something out of the deal. Everyone needed to share in the success, or else we were not going to see the deal close.
So the day we sat down with a map of the Litke land, and began to discuss where certain activities could or would best take place, was the day we began to get to a win-win outcome. In the end every interest group got something out of the acquisition. Audubon and Sierra Club saw certain sensitive lands there set aside as natural and wild areas, where logging, road building, and gas drilling would not occur. We created a 1,400-acre ATV riding area on reclaimed and unreclaimed coal mining land there, too, the first one on public land in Pennsylvania, which today has generated substantial economic activity in ultra-rural Beech Creek.
Much of the Litke forest was set aside as “plain vanilla” State Forest, where people can walk, hike, camp, hunt, trap, fish, and cut timber. The streamside railway that came with it became an important rail-trail, drawing tourists (and their dollars) from far and wide.
And I did not learn how to do this cold. Rather, in 1995 to 1996, I had successfully used the same approach in the Middle East Peace Process agricultural projects in Jordan, Israel, and the West Bank when I was at US EPA, representing our agency in the diplomatic process.
Boy, you talk about competing interests! There was no shortage there, but in the end I was dubbed “Little Kissinger” for the sidebar negotiations I created, which got the overall projects back on track. Winners and winners.
My hope is Standing Rock will provoke the best in us. Barack Hussein Obama did nothing to help the folks there, until two weeks ago he made a purely political and symbolic decision against the pipeline. Obama has always been about winners and losers, heck he enjoys creating losers, so who can be surprised by his action here. Like everywhere else over his eight-year tenure, Obama squandered an opportunity to facilitate competing interests find common ground.
And that is what needs to happen at Standing Rock: Common ground.
Aren’t there potential solutions to this standoff that are win-win? I can think of three or four potential solutions that would probably be acceptable to the main parties.
We have a new president who understands the concept and importance of win-win outcomes. Hopefully President Trump appoints a solid and good-faith negotiator to resolve the head-on collision at Standing Rock, for everyone’s benefit.
Winners and winners.
George Washington’s 1789 proclamation
Thanksgiving Proclamation
by President George Washington, at the request of Congress, on October 3, 1789
By the President of the United States of America, a Proclamation.
Whereas it is the duty of all nations to acknowledge the providence of Almighty God, to obey His will, to be grateful for His benefits, and humbly to implore His protection and favor; and—Whereas both Houses of Congress have, by their joint committee, requested me “to recommend to the people of the United States a day of public thanksgiving and prayer, to be observed by acknowledging with grateful hearts the many and signal favors of Almighty God, especially by affording them an opportunity peaceably to establish a form of government for their safety and happiness:”
Now, therefore, I do recommend and assign Thursday, the 26th day of November next, to be devoted by the people of these States to the service of that great and glorious Being who is the beneficent author of all the good that was, that is, or that will be; that we may then all unite in rendering unto Him our sincere and humble thanks for His kind care and protection of the people of this country previous to their becoming a nation; for the signal and manifold mercies and the favor, able interpositions of His providence in the course and conclusion of the late war; for the great degree of tranquillity, union, and plenty which we have since enjoyed; for the peaceable and rational manner in which we have been enabled to establish constitutions of government for our safety and happiness, and particularly the national one now lately instituted; for the civil and religious liberty with which we are blessed, and the means we have of acquiring and diffusing useful knowledge; and, in general, for all the great and various favors which He has been pleased to confer upon us.
And also that we may then unite in most humbly offering our prayers and supplications to the great Lord and Ruler of Nations, and beseech Him to pardon our national and other trangressions; to enable us all, whether in public or private stations, to perform our several and relative duties properly and punctually; to render our National Government a blessing to all the people by constantly being a Government of wise, just, and constitutional laws, discreetly and faithfully executed and obeyed; to protect and guide all sovereigns and nations (especially such as have shown kindness to us), and to bless them with good governments, peace, and concord; to promote the knowledge and practice of true religion and virtue, and the increase of science among them and us; and, generally, to grant unto all mankind such a degree of temporal prosperity as He alone knows to be best.
Given under my hand at the City of New York the third day of October in the year of our Lord 1789.
Go. Washington
The American spirit is alive and well
Rejecting an openly corrupt and evil candidate who intended to run America through executive fiat, our voters have acted in nearly biblical fashion, saving our budding Gomorrah from ruin.
The original American spirit is yet alive, just enough to save us all.
The adults have stepped in.
Hopefully, the La Raza offices will be raided, traitors outed and deported, Soros will have his money impounded and a warrant issued for his arrest. He needs to spend his last years behind bars.
And Nana Clinton must finally be held accountable. No fake retroactive presidential pardons for her. Wait to charge her after Obama leaves office. And then charge Obama for his own treason. Bring the whole evil empire down. It is a Gomorrah worthy of complete annihilation.
God bless America.
America’s Frontier Identity Cuts Both Ways
America is a frontier nation.
It was carved out of the North American continent, geographically speaking, and conquered and purchased from its first inhabitants, the American Indians, sociologically speaking.
This was a frontier within a frontier within a frontier. Walls upon walls of high mountain ranges, surrounded by a vast ocean. As the Europeans steadily pushed inland, they found one Garden of Eden after another after another. This experience forged an identity not seen since the Hebrews left Egypt and trekked through the desert to the Promised Land.
One of America’s great beauties is its identity, the frontier identity, resulting from and coming out of our founding times. This is an idea in most people’s heads that the nation is huge, nearly limitless, nearly boundless. This is an inspiring conception, and it has been bolstered by 250 years of unfettered individual success.
Over the years industrialists, and to an increasing extent Republicans, were accused of having a false sense of natural resource limits. The natural resource exploitation of the 1800s and 1900s gave birth to unimagined material wealth, and also incredible land, water, and soil pollution. Some observers have more or less said this inexact misuse of valuable resources was due to the frontier mentality our early industrialists inherited.
Today, it can easily and more exactingly be said that the Left is living in a fantasy haze of unsustainable frontier mentality. The bizarre notion that tens of millions of illegal border crossers can simply enter any nation, here we are talking about America, and impose enormous costs on the inhabitants without fueling an explosive conflict is one of the standbys for liberals and Democrats today.
That Los Angeles and every other Western city is out of land, air and water (their huge impacts on schools, roads, hospitals, police and sewage infrastructure are barely guessed at) and yet must steadily absorb an increasing number of illegal economic migrants is a testament to the failed frontier mentality of the white liberals promoting this assault on their fellow American citizens. Some say liberals will burn down their house to keep control of it, and I might agree with that, if I thought it were going to be burned down. Instead, I am more likely to believe that we are headed toward some sort of genocide where my house will remain intact, but I and my family will be officially evaporated. To make room for someone “more deserving.”
Only in huge nations like America, and Russia, and China can these fantasies play out. The mental frontier is so vast, so unattainable, that pretty much anything can go, and everything will be alright. Stalin and Mao toyed with it, and used it. Today the American Democrats are following in that path, albeit slower, right now.
I myself am drawn to the frontier mentality that values wilderness, clean streams, large unbroken blocks of forest, farmland, and wildlife habitat. To me, that is the best expression of America’s frontier legacy, and boy do I like to roam in the big woods. A lot of the animals there seem more interesting than a lot of people I encounter.
Tomorrow we all vote, a referendum on this frontier mentality. My own conception has never been very popular with either of the political parties. Instead, we will see one side vying for the ability of a person to make his or her own way on merit alone, and the other side trying to flood the streets with new voters who can artificially breathe life into an unsustainable frontier mentality and create an America sure to fall apart.
And thus, the frontier mentality cuts both ways, for good and for bad, for health and for ruin, for fairness and injustice. Will our old frontier mentality ride in to save the day?
Rolling Stone & Gawker decisions are a good first step
First it was Gawker, the sensationalist “new media” icon that abandoned decency to make an extra few pennies. Along the way of Gawker’s brutal path lay strewn the unfairly damaged reputations of many innocent people, including homosexuals who wanted their private lives to remain private.
When Hulk Hogan sued Gawker and won a huge award that reflected the cruelty they had inflicted on him, normal people rejoiced.
Today Rolling Stone magazine has been held accountable for a fabricated story about an alleged rape at the University of Virginia campus.
Turned out, everything in that story was false. A federal court jury assigned a huge award to the very real victims of that story, and more victims will be coming forward to hold the fake journalists responsible for their assault on truth and justice.
These are good steps in the correct direction. It is time the other media outlets were also similarly held accountable for their fake “reporting” on political and cultural subjects. The willful misconduct now being represented as honest reporting is damaging American democracy. All this pro-Clinton anti-Trump political activism masquerading as impartial, professional journalism counts as an illegal and unaccounted trillion dollar donation to the Clinton campaign. Time to clean this up.
Every day now new facts leak out from the FBI and the New York City police department. Computer files demonstrate how utterly corrupt and evil Clinton is and those who surround her. America was not designed to withstand official corruption aided and abetted by the media complex. And the official mainstream media news blackout about the corruption emanating from the White House is exactly that: Aiding and abetting
Without a public airing of this dirty laundry, America cannot cleanse itself and right the ship. Political coverups are like initial murders. The collateral murders that follow as the perpetrators try to cover their tracks are where the real damage is done.
Here we have a growing pile of evidence of the worst sort of illegal deeds, and the people who don’t want to be held responsible are making official government decisions to stop the inquiries.
Only the media can let the American people know, and yet they are blocking the news. What is the cost of this crime? What is the penalty?
Why this election is important
This election is a public referendum on the way America is run.
Right now we have the US Attorney General personally intervening in the FBI investigation of Hillary Clinton. Loretta Lynch is personally using her official position in the Obama Administration to block criminal accountability for an American citizen.
Is this the Rule of Law? Is America now being run like a Third World country?
President Richard Nixon went down in flames for crimes much less significant than what Hillary Clinton appears to have committed. Why is Hillary Clinton not being held to the same standard as Nixon?
Both Obama and Clinton use the levers of administrative power to pursue policies they cannot obtain through Congress, per the US Constitution. A weak Republican establishment is more worried about its own political career, and will not confront these unconstitutional abuses of power.
A compliant press that shares the agenda of Obama and Clinton shields both of them from scrutiny and honest news reporting, and viciously attacks people who do try to raise legitimate concerns. The mainstream press is now an attack dog for one political party. Most “news” professionals no longer even pretend to be objective.
Sure, there are two flawed presidential candidates. But one of them has serious criminal issues, while the other just bugs people with his big mouth. The flaws are not comparable or equal. Voters who easily disregard Hillary’s criminality maintain a mindset they will never tolerate with other Americans. They simply want a certain set of policy outcomes enshrined in Federal law or executive actions, regardless of the cost.
This is why this election is so important.
Do Americans want to be run by a strong president, who simply does whatever he or she wants to do, and Congress is more of an advisory body? That is how Rome was run by the Caesars, and the political swings were so wild whenever an administration changed that bodies littered the streets each time. Is this where you want America to go?
Do you really believe that 50% of the American electorate will stand back and let their country fall apart and the rule of law suspended? Civil wars have been fought over less.
Trump is not an ideal candidate, but he is not a criminal, and nowhere near as flawed or as dangerous as Hillary Clinton. Voting for Clinton rewards her criminality. Voting for Trump is voting for a stable America where the rule of law remains. You cannot go wrong with that.
Wikileaks says “next week Hillary gets arrested”
Despite a wall designed by the mainstream media to blackout and blockade the actual news surrounding Hillary Clinton, and talk up obviously contrived, fake issues about Trump, Wikileaks is beginning to leak past, under, around, and through all of the underhanded attempts to elect an unqualified crook by keeping the American electorate ignorant of Hillary’s many serious crimes.
Go to Wikileaks and see the emails yourself.
These emails are damning.
Hillary Clinton is a walking criminal enterprise like nothing the world has seen before. Influence peddling, theft of private charitable donations to the sham Clinton Foundation, misuse of public funds, misuse of public information (people right now are going to jail for far less important offenses), and even worse.
Wikileaks says that next week’s email dump will result in Hillary Clinton’s arrest.
Property Taxes: Vote them OUT
A version of this opinion-editorial was submitted to the Patriot News editorial editor, John Micek. He usually prints my opinion pieces, but it also takes a lot of hemming and hawing. UPDATE: The Patriot News did run this op-ed on 11/2/16. Thank you, John Micek.
Property Taxes Must End
In graduate school, our economics professors gave us hypothetical tax and income scenarios to solve. Our homework was to critique various tax and revenue structures, and find the optimum public fund distributions, based on subjective values. These learning exercises were designed to give us the ability to present decision makers with a range of policy options best suited to a particular culture or economic perspective. A lot of my peers there were international students headed home to basically run their countries.
My take on property tax is that it spreads the burden around to those least likely to directly benefit from it, those least likely to see an indirect benefit from it, and those least likely to afford it. It penalizes working people the most. Politically it is treated like an off-the-books cash cow, pushing an increasingly unmanageable burden on our most vulnerable citizens. School property taxes are the worst and most unfair form of tax possible. A thousand years ago in Europe they were considered fair, because the taxing authorities no longer had to search and pillage individual farms while looking for “extra” grain and meat hidden among the farmer’s possessions. Land taxes were then tied to the particular land’s productive capabilities. Thin soils on rocky terrain in cold climates with short growing seasons were “penny lands,” because they annually produced only pennies worth of food and fiber beyond basic subsistence levels. “Ouncelands” farms on rich soils in warmer climates produced enough “extra” food to be annually valued in ounces of silver. And so on.
Today even this basic leveling philosophy is long gone from our property tax arrangements, as is the agricultural world that started property taxes altogether. Now it’s a free for all, with school property taxes disconnected from serving students, and directed to gold plating the various administrative and pension arrangements concocted by politically powerful unions, or building unneeded, expensive monuments to the failed educational profession in the form of elementary and high school “campuses” on productive farmland. Thus, the poorest cities with the lowest real estate values have the highest school taxes. This is bad policy, bad government, bad taxation, and it must end. We citizens deserve much better from our government.
Here in Pennsylvania’s 15th senate district, one candidate (the incumbent) has voted several times against repealing, changing, eliminating, or even reforming school property taxes. Then again, he has received tens of thousands of dollars from government school unions.
The other candidate has pledged to support Act 76, the property tax elimination bill that would keep Grandma from getting ejected from her home of fifty years because she can’t pay $23.76 in back taxes to a school district that only knows how to spend, spend, spend, and to which she has not sent a kid since 1963.
If you live here in the 15th senate district, next week you should vote for the candidate who says he supports Act 76. That person is John DiSanto.
Josh First is a businessman living in Harrisburg City.