Posts Tagged → union
War is hell
To best understand the world around us, we employ the science of math. And not just any math, but statistics and graphs. Using even just a little bit of good data, we can accurately plot on the basic X-Y graph the trajectory of a national economy, the sales of cars, or the increase in public violence. Well should we do the last first, because all the rest rely upon its resolution.
Today is 9-11, the September 11, 2001 modern day of infamy, when Muslim terrorists hijacked American planes and used them as guided missiles to destroy or damage important symbols of American success. Curiously, 20-some years later, America has more problems associated with more Muslim problem makers than we did in 2001. Almost as if we have failed to learn a lesson from that day, which we will call our first data point.
Yesterday, gentle, kind, civil Charlie Kirk was murdered while he engaged in peaceful dialogue about political issues of the day in America. His killer appears to be a “trans” person or “trans” ally, or maybe a foreign hitman. Whatever, the act is representative of a catch-all of ever increasing political violence committed by far-left allies of West-hating Muslims, including many who actually live here, as naturalized citizens, no less. So, with Charlie’s murder we have data point number two.
Now, let’s connect these two data points by drawing a line on the graph. We see a nice straight line going straight up, showing that as time has gone forward from 2001 to 2025, domestic acts of political violence against Americans and America have increased. A lot. Sure looks like we are headed toward a war, because with a climb that steep who knows what else it could indicate?
Bigger numbers!
Union General William Tecumseh Sherman burned the Confederate South in his “total war” effort. He famously quipped that “War is hell,” and added a lot of other valuable words in various formats and times around that simple phrase, even as he remarked that mangling the bodies of a couple thousand fighting men in a morning was like dashing water against his face. Sherman didn’t balk and he did not back down.
America is back in hell, right now, as a civil war is engulfing us. Sucks to say it, but it is a fact. We did not start it, we have begged for it to stop, but it keeps being brought to us. Might as well be honest about it, say we don’t like it, but by God, the Union is gonna survive and prevail once again.
So, repeat after me… War is hell.
Now let’s win it, and be done with it.
Labor: To work for something of value
Today is Labor Day in the USA, and while it might have some bad Marxist roots with the early unions, the fact is that it has also evolved into the uglier side of capitalism, which is an orgy of shallow consumerism. Big retail sales of everything from underpants to mattresses to cars, America today is awash in carnival tents and men in top hats and coat tails, barking loudly at the masses to step right up and buy the latest greatest gadget or whatever.
Not too long ago, labor unions played such an important role in American politics (and in British politics, for that matter), that every Tom, Dick, and Harriet knew precisely what Labor Day was about. That most Americans, especially our youth, make little or no mental connection between Labor Day and the people who labor away with their hands and bodies to make things of value for us, for them, is the real take-away meaning of today’s national holiday.
But how could young people know, or older Americans recall, what Labor Day is about if nearly all of our labor has been curiously shipped overseas, and to our enemies, no less? A factory job was the family and church and community- sustaining source of income from the 1930s until about 2000, when the last of our American factories were carefully packaged up and sent to China. Now we have 25 years of no no labor and no factories, just Rust Belt husks of buildings, churches, and communities across the Eastern and Mid-Western USA. No wonder our kids are clueless about Labor Day.
However, our snickering elected officials know precisely what Labor Day is about, because it is still directly relevant to them. These self-anointed elites who seek to dominate all of us use our labor to enrich themselves, through the mis-appropriation and mis-spending of our tax monies. This self-destructive activity happens most and worst in liberal “blue” states run by the Democrat Party, where voters enable single-party rule without the checks and balances of multi-party competition. That this repetitive voting pattern is self-defeating seems not to matter to leftist messianic utopians, whose Big Government god requires nonstop sacrifice and endless cash invested in friendly “businesses”.
Where does this endless cash come from, which enables the extravagant “public servant” aristocracy? YOU.
You labor, pay high taxes on your income, and that tax money is taken for messianic utopian policies, like disproven climate change nonsense, that enriches other blue aristocrats who are invested in these schemes.
Ideally, you, the citizen, pay taxes to the government so the government can pay for services to you, the citizen: Firemen, policemen, public education in math, history, and spelling, public roads, trash pickup, etc. This is the social compact of democratic representative government; you get concrete services in return for relinquishing your own money to the Tax Man.
But when government becomes detached from the symbiotic relationship, and begins doing things for itself, and ignoring the citizen, you have tyranny. This is becoming brutally apparent in Britain, France, and liberal states in America. California is an especially scary place because of how far out of alignment the state government is with the citizenry. No services, but instead illegal migrants, homeless encamped in private front yards, general lawlessness, and the highest of high taxes to boot. Complete breakdown of the social compact between citizen and government, and don’t you dare step out of line.
This failure continues because most of the citizenry continues to vote for a single dominant political party that hates the citizenry. In liberal venues, hating yourself is the greatest of virtue signals, and is highly rewarded with public acclamation. I myself could not live in such an unsustainable and bizarre place. The people there are living off of the banked fumes of once-great capitalist endeavors there, now either departed or departing for Texas, Tennessee, or Florida.
Last week Britain’s highest court ruled that the illegal migrants overwhelming British society – built with citizen labor taxes – have higher value and more rights than the citizens themselves. Such brazen detachment from the long established democratic social compact means the British citizens are now mere money sources, slaves, really, infested by and under the boot heel of a parasitic government and its new stakeholders, the illegals, who contribute nothing and demand everything.
Even the British Union Jack flag is being outlawed on the streets of Britain, because it “offends” the illegal border invaders! Say the “wrong” thing about this, do the “wrong” thing about this, and you actually go to jail. True tyranny, not freedom, not democracy.
Britain is headed to civil war, as any nation would be where the government has turned against the people it is supposed to serve, and upon whose tax-paying largesse the government depends. The same thing is happening here in American blue states, where entrenched single party rule, based on a taxpaying slave-political elite slave owner relationship, is about to be confronted by a fed-up federal government trying to hold the Union together. Something of value worth laboring for, again, as it was in 1861.
This is the meaning of Labor Day today.
Fair trade, not free trade
When I ran for Congress (at that time the PA 10th inhabited by Democrat Tim Holden, which included about all of Schuylkill County and parts or all of Berks, Lebanon, Dauphin and Perry counties) in 2009-2010, I remembered and repeated a phrase from my long ago 1980s political activism days in Centre County – Fair trade, not free trade.
Despite being fifteen years ago, this phrase caught on with our voter audiences. They really liked it, and many voters I met while campaigning had personal stories about their family’s various jobs in then-shuttered factories. And I was reminded of watching a high tech glass and industrial mirror factory close up shop in State College, PA, around 2000. It was the old Corning branch there on the Benner Pike. Literally sat there and watched the workers carefully, lovingly package up their machinery for its trip to the “new” factory in China. Some of the workers went over to train their Chinese counterparts, before returning to State College without a job.
Funny thing that President Trump’s tariff policy amounts to this exact summation of the more or less running bank account that every responsible nation keeps with all other trading partners. The fact that only most nations are tariffing American made goods at high rates, while enjoying very low tariffs on their products imported into America, is a sign of what ails us Americans: We think we can give give and give away everything we have, and we are too big to fail from it all. Which is nonsense.
Interestingly, we see the same argument about illegal immigration and endless government spending: No limits, America must take and absorb all of the costs that the world places on us…Everything is “free free free” except, of course, it isn’t free. These policies come with huge costs to Americans.
Free trade, as in giving away our trade imbalances for free, which enriches everyone else and impoverishes Americans, is a sign that our policy makers and indeed our own voters falsely believed that America is such a huge fountain of bounty and wealth that it can endlessly sustain this. What a silly and dangerous fantasy.
Sending our factory jobs, indeed our actual factories with all of their equipment and machinery, abroad to be re-born in China, Vietnam, India and elsewhere was nuts. It sent our means of production, our workers, our jobs, and our money out of America. All America got in return was maybe cheaper and junkier versions of what we had once made here, at a high quality. And yet this “free trade” thing picked up steam as big American corporations and their pet politicians began to take on a global view of trade. No longer were companies based in Delaware “American.” Rather, many of these companies’ senior leaders considered them to be global citizens that just happened to find a perch in America.
This off-shoring of everything America makes, grows, produces went on unchecked for a good thirty years, until everyone began to notice the downside, the cost. Just about every East Coast and Mid West state now has its own “rust belt” area. Areas filled with hulking, empty brick buildings and over-grown parking lots next to rivers and highways tell the sad tale of America’s economic downfall, and our nearing ruin.
Sure, we had a lot of government spending in the past twenty years to temporarily make up for the job losses, the depressed wages, the looming home foreclosures. But that spending is unsustainable. It is “robbing Peter to pay Paul.” It is simply printing Dollars for the sake of printing them. Less and less stands behind them. And yet someone standing way back there in the background was making a ton of money off of this screwy policy, while the rest of us Americans lost from it.
And so now we have a bold and very natural pro-America policy, the equalization of tariffs, making trade fair, not free, and the whole world is suddenly going upside down. My 401(k)! My dog’s retirement account! Oh my God, what will happen?
Folks, relax. Do a bong hit or have a glass of red wine. Our American world is not only not going to end, it is going to return to our glory days. Yes, it takes time, it will take time, so don’t be a bunch of prissy little Gen Z weenies demanding immediate gratification. America is worth fighting for, and these dueling tariffs are the opening salvo. Round One.
You know what is kind of oddly funny about that Fair trade, not free trade slogan? As apt as it is right now, I got that from some 1980s Centre County union workers, which trade or factory or coal mine they were in, I no longer recall. But they were right. And Trump is right. And we Americans are all aligned together on this to Make America’s Economy Great Again…
All together now, breeeaaathe…
Choices: Principles vs Institutions
Humans create institutions to institutionalize our values, religious practices, hopes and aspirations, cultural identity, etc. Our institutions are created in order to make permanent and carry our values forward, a sort of vehicle. Schools, libraries, government agencies, religious institutions, family foundations, charitable foundations, unions, associations, etc, every single one created with a mission to implement certain principles.
Over time people naturally identify with a particular institution, become a champion of it, and a stakeholder to it. Again, private schools, public school PTAs, library associations, the National Ukrainian Club, various church and synagogue umbrella groups, Democrat Party, Republican Party, etc, you know those particular institutions in your own life, because they reflect your values.
What happens when the institution no longer represents or reflects the founding principles that breathed life and cause into it?
Examples abound: The United Nations works against the western democracies who founded it and currently pay for it. The Democrat Party has become a wild communist orgy of anti-Americanism; the Republican Party has forsworn its abolitionist roots and has become a bunch of establishment do-nothing fuddy-duddies; the National Rifle Association accretes multiple layers of bureaucracy into everything it does, instead of spending its limited money pursuing individual freedom; school teachers unions become outlets for destructive radical politics, far outside the mainstream of American families; a local church or synagogue is poorly run by a small group of self-reinforcing, self selecting, like-minded establishmentarians who cannot and will not respond to changes in their respective demographics…
The one that got me thinking about this subject is the Pennsylvania Federation of Sportsmen’s Clubs, a sportsmen’s group I had a long relationship with, which then attempted to take a hard left turn into climate alarmism and gun regulation back in 2020. In one quick weekend of fake votes and heavily manipulated elections, the PFSC leadership torpedoed the institution the leaders said they loved. Their far-left politics alienated their base, and the group has not yet recovered its former standing.
With PFSC, I took a hard and public stand, and while I succeeded in stopping the old group from becoming leftist stooges of the charitable foundation trust fund sector, I also lost a lot of friends. People who were loyal to the PFSC they remembered, and who they wanted it to still be. Some blamed me for damaging PFSC’s public reputation, while I blamed PFSC’s leadership for making unpopular decisions its base rejected. For sure the messenger got shot!
In 2020, PFSC’s leaders jettisoned the principles on which PFSC was originally founded, and a great portion of their natural base stopped believing in the institution.
Recently I stepped back from a formal leadership role in a local house of worship, as the venerable institution begins to crumble onto itself. Leaders there, who fondly remember this house of worship from their childhood, cannot make the tough decisions necessary to keep it alive, and in fact keep making decisions that guarantee few or no young people will join it and keep it going. This particular institution is beginning to greatly deviate from its own founding principles, and its base, its natural adherents and admirers, no longer recognize it.
One last example: The US Environmental Protection Agency was a place I badly wanted to work in while I was in college back in the mid 1980s. When I finally got to work at the USEPA, I realized that a great deal of the basic principle that had undergirded its founding had been long since tossed overboard. In place of the simple principle of a clean environment came a whole regime of anti-capitalism, anti-America regulations. After seven years as a policy staffer at USEPA, I could not wait to get out. I now think the agency needs a whole new name and a very clear mission change.
So should we be loyal to the hollowed out shells of institutions that now exist mostly in facade, gutted of what they once stood for, hopeful that they will somehow regain their former glory, or should we seek to create new institutions that are more representative of the principles that enervated the originals we so dearly loved and identified with?
Change is a constant, evolution is healthy, and institutions that do not change to some degree become stale, immobile, static, and fragile. But those that deviate from their founding principles are destined for a much faster devolution, because most people just simply stop believing in them.
The competitive free market will cause new institutions to spring alive, bringing hope and aspiration anew to old principles, replacing the old institutions as they dry up and wither away. For me, I am of two minds: Stay loyal to the old institution until that is no longer possible, on principle, and then help found a new one, on principle.
A Tale of Two Different Approaches to Life, Government
We are witnessing a growing storm right now. Of historic, unprecedented proportion. Something out of a fantastical Hollywood CGI movie is taking shape in front of our eyes. Except this is no fake fantasy, it is the harshest of realities about to descend on all of us. God willing, and for good reason.
What started out as small dark clouds in 2016 has morphed into an enormous, growing boiling cloud mass with lightning shooting out of it, ominous rumblings became peals of sharp thunder. Pick your Armageddon or end-of-the-world SciFi movie, America and the entire planet are entering a new state of being, and this huge ever-growing storm of apocalyptic size and appearance is coming with it.
A Biblical parallel would be the Exodus story, where God’s holy Angel of Death went house to house, inflicting destruction, except on those pure souls who were favored. Or, America is about to witness a Noah-like flood that is going to wipe away all of the sinful grotesquery and leave a cleansed albeit forlorn and changed landscape behind, where green things can grow again in a purified world.
We are seeing the difference between two different ways of looking at life and government play out. And this Biblical clash of good vs. evil is about to get ugly, and disruptive. And beautiful. Change is constant, necessary, painful, and beautiful.
On the one hand is the Uniparty-Media establishment complex, with its ever expanding bloated, unaccountable, lawless, change-resistant, all-powerful federal bureaucracies. This huge, unholy carnivorous plant has been watered with the hard-earned tax money of the American people (taken at gunpoint) for about a hundred years, ever since progressive (Communist) president Woodrow Wilson began inflicting his vision for Big Government and Little Citizen on America.
Relying on the once-inspiring frontier mentality that America was always going to grow, expand, reach ever greater heights of achievement, progressives (statist communists, now Democrats) and their Uniparty GOP allies siphoned off ever larger amounts of American private sector achievement to fund their socialist horror experiment. And with everything on the line, they illegally manipulated voting machines and voting laws and looked the other way to steal the 2020 election, so they could cement their Uniparty rule over all of us once and for all.
And so here we are, about a hundred years after this slow growing cancerous fungus first took hold, and the American people are beholding this evil thing that was just about to take over our lives, eat us all up, and continue growing. Americans were slated to become permanent slaves to the Uniparty bureaucracy and its unelected functionaries who have been holding ever increasing power over our individual fates. And the American people said NO.
In response to the evil Uniparty bureaucracy, the American people just re-re-elected someone who believes in and is willing to fight fight fight at any cost for the original founding vision of America: A place of freedom and limitless opportunity for all of its citizens.
A place where the government exists to serve the citizens, not the other way around.
The coming shock as these two worlds collide is going to be cataclysmic. Yes, proponents of freedom and liberty are going to get the great cleansing they are hoping for, that America desperately needs. But do not kid yourself that the resulting fallout is going to be beautiful, or easy. No, it will be shocking to America’s core. We need this, but it will not be easy.
As the three readers of this blog already know, your dutiful author here is devoted to freedom and liberty at all costs, inlcuding the freewill donation of his own blood and life, need be. Minuteman at the ready, absolutely. Freedom from tyranny may be achieved, but it always comes at a cost, a true and measurable cost. And we are about to witness it, as the evil towers of Mordor come crumbling to the ground in a great shock. Hopefully without bloodshed.
What comes afterwards will be a weird quiet. The sound of one hand clapping, maybe. A thin, still blast of the shofar, heard at Sinai when the Law was given.
For those who are confused by this essay, take note of just one of dozens of such current policy situations: outgoing dementia-ridden White House resident Joe Biden has just signed a new contract with about 42,000 unionized federal workers, obligating the federal government to granting certain lush work conditions with these employees. Done as a business-as-usual end-run around the incoming storm, it ignores the catastrophic blast about to hit Washington, DC.
To wit: Every federal worker serves at the choice of the Chief Executive, who is The President. So all of these 42,000 federal workers can be immediately furloughed, their new gravy train contract rendered moot, and the incoming storm’s ongoing clean sweep will continue unabated. End of business-as-usual.
One man’s wreckage is another man’s treasure, I suppose. I am looking forward to picking over the smoking battlefield when this is over. But I bet I will find some distant kinfolk lying there, too. Painful price to pay, but necessary.
Project 2025 & Hawk Tuah Girl
Liberals are not “crazy” or “idiots” or “stupid.” Liberals/ woke/ PC/ Democrats just see the world differently than people who want to survive.
While the political Left is not very religious, it is messianic about the coming role of big government that has to happen for the world to be perfected, in their view. Most leftists decry socialism, and earnestly deny they are socialists, but the policies they want are all socialist. And leftists are OK with or will look the other way from the brutal anti-freedom actions and crushing societal dominoes falling that need to happen for leftist policies to be implemented.
So I don’t think leftists/ Democrats are “crazy” or “idiots.” They just see the world really differently than I do. And I believe that their policies are either overtly communist or are going to naturally usher in communism, which is the end of a free America.
Why leftists/ Democrats think this way is confusing to me. America is a pretty great place to live, the best place, actually. So why screw it all up? As radio host Mark Levin pointed out last year, the Democrat Party is now the party of big government. It sure is NOT the “party of the common man, the little guy.” That ended a long time ago when Silicone Valley, Wall Street, Corporate America, mainstream media, academia, teacher’s unions, federal government, etc all fell into the Democrat Party partisan orbit.
There is no room in that elitist orbit for the common man, the little guy, the electrician or auto worker. His sole role is to work hard, pay taxes, obey the elites’ arbitrary laws and diktats, and feed that hungry constellation of interests with his union dues and taxes.
And I say all this because of not yet meeting one leftist / Democrat (in my entire life) who is able or willing to engage with me in a calm, sustained, analytical discussion about politics or economics. Without fail, the leftists/ Democrats in my family, life circle, work world all quickly become hostile, defensive, begin to yell, and cannot have a civil discussion when their ideas are questioned. They go from a calm 0 to a set-you-on-fire 100 in about twenty seconds.
Probably because Leftists/ Democrats are thinking with their emotions – the exciting feeling release of dopamines when their brains’ neural pathways smoothly flow with the perfect messianic mantra of Democrat Party political words and promises of utopian Nirvana on earth in our lifetimes. If only with higher taxes and less damned freedom in the way. How dare I drop a turd into the punchbowl at their dopamine party and screw everything up that just feels so good with my annoying numbers ‘n stuff?
Something like that.
Again, leftists/ Democrats are not stupid, or dumb, or idiots, they are emotional thinkers uncomfortable with the boring numbers and cold logic of conservatives. These are two ships passing one another in the night, and never the twain shall meet. Except they do tend to meet at Antietam, Gettysburg, Bull Run and let’s not remind ourselves of where this fracture naturally goes and flows.
So when the cold, annoying numbers of “Project 2025” suddenly burst on the national scene, it was the leftists/ Democrats who were the first to chimp out and draw attention to it. Literally no one else in America had heard of Project 2025, most especially the Republicans and conservatives who had their faces smooshed into it by Democrat mainstream media accusations. President Trump plainly said “I have no idea what you are talking about. I have never heard of Project 2025 and no idea what it is.” He was speaking for all of us. It was true.
The fierce leftist/ Democrat accusation being that mean old Project 2025 was Trump’s own personal policy agenda. And apparently this policy agenda really sucked for Democrats because it was full of annoying numbers ‘n stuff. Zero emotion. Ergo it must be bad, must be destroyed, and everyone associated with it or who could be thrown onto the bonfire with it.
Like Trump and everyone else around me (to many people in my personal life and work circle I am “Mister Republican” and “the political guy” who people call, email, and approach on the work site to talk about politics) I had no idea what Project 2025 was when the mainstream media went crazy with it. Like I just said, and which you can see for yourself with the link above, it is just a bunch of wishful wonky policy gobbledegook by the policy nerds at the Heritage Foundation, a thinktank in Washington, DC. But Project 2025 served as the scary harsh foil and mean boogie man for the Democrats’ happy happy joy joy joy approach to politics.
While all of this oh-so-crazy hullaballoo was happening about Project 2025 and Elon Musk live interviewing President Trump and other really just terribly awful things that ruin emotional thinkers’ days and America too, some cute young lady was overheard in public talking about (sorry folks, this is actually real) spitting on a man’s p*nis.
“You just go hawk tuah, and spit on that thang,” said Haliey Welch, joking around in her Southern Tennessee twang.
And just like that, an American star was born. No lie, Haliey Welch, a pretty and nice enough young lady who lives with her memaw in a farming community in rural Tennessee, became a rock star. An influencer. Big time. With lawyers, and agents, a team, and trademarks and intellectual property contracts and lawsuits and millions to be made. Overnight, Haliey Welch went from 0 to 100 in about one week. That’s probably measured in millions, not miles per hour.
And you know what? Hawk Tuah stickers and tee shirts and emblems and flags are now everywhere in America. Nobody knows what the hell the phrase means, until you look it up on the computer chip implanted in your hand while driving behind a truck with Hawk Tuah on their back window in the grocery store parking lot, and you then say out loud in your most shocked emotional thinking voice possible “Is that really what the hell that means?!”
So get this straight, my fellow Americans: Project 2025 is very, very naughty, and everyone who can be accused of being associated with it is also very naughty. Hurt them, destroy them, go chimp out on them and get all sadistic on them. But Hawk Tuah? Why that is happy happy joy joy joy! Wahoo, let the good times roll.
Everybody get a Hawk Tuah tee shirt on, a cold beer in hand, and smile and laugh, and just feel good for whatever reason enters into your brain at that moment. Mom and dad buy all the groceries and pay all the bills, and college tuition is gonna be free one way or another, and man is life good in America.
Ain’t America in great shape?
Excuse me while I hawk tuah on the ground.
One dad’s Father’s Day question to young Americans
Hi kids. Today is Father’s Day, a card company-inspired day for Americans to spend money on things like cards and gifts. It is a blatantly commercial event, but in the grand scheme of things, there are worse things to celebrate than fatherhood. Like an entire month dedicated to a person’s private sexual practices. I can make a strong case for June being Gardening Month.
Along with Motherhood, Fatherhood has been the guiding idea of the healthy and safe human family for probably close to a hundred thousand years: Physical protection from predatory animals and humans, life guidance in a world full of pitfalls and confusion, passing on skills and knowledge in a competitive world where making a living to stay alive and out of poverty is not easy. In short, fathers have been the other half of a successful family since the dawn of our species.
So don’t forget to call, email, text, or send a card to your dad today. Show some appreciation, even if your dad is occasionally foolish, an assh*le, selfish, whatever. The truth is, this man created you (with your mother), and you are here only because of him. Your life exists because of him.
So, in my role as a dad I have a question for the young people in America right now: Why are any of you supporting the main source of uncertainty that you face in the world’s greatest nation?
America went from a powerful and successful economy in 2020 to a continued and purposeful self-destructive free-fall from 2021 to today, with high inflation that eats away at the value of the Dollar in your pocket, fewer and fewer jobs, fewer good jobs, higher fees and taxes, millions of illegal invaders pouring over our borders who impose huge costs directly on you, and a huge amount of uncertainty now facing you.
There is just one source for all of this uncertainly: The political Left, which includes the mainstream media, academia, the government schools, the teacher’s unions, government bureaucracies, and the Democrat Party.
Not to mention all of the censorship, the attempt to control your words, your thoughts, your freedom to spend your money the way you want, your freedom to travel when and how you want. I could go on, but there is just one source for all of this effort to control everything you do and think and say: The political Left.
You say that abortion is your number one issue? Why? What on earth makes you feel empowered about ending the life of another person on demand, on a whim, without any thought or consideration? Don’t you think this is a weak approach to a literal life-and-death issue?
Did your parents treat you like a whim and just tear your little body apart and flush you down a drain? No, because you are here reading these words, probaby because your Father and Mother valued you and your presence on Planet Earth as a living human.
And if you think abortion is a constitutional issue, well, that has been dealt with in recent years. You can choose to live in a state that supports abortion on demand, if that is what is most important to you. As a dad, I find this a confusing motivator, but each to her own…just how many abortions do you plan on having?
For the constitutionally uneducated, abortion is not mentioned anywhere in the Constitution or the Bill of Rights, mostly because abortion was frowned upon for the vast amount of human existence. Especially in 1787, when the Constitution was being ratified. Children (like you, who were not aborted and are therefore reading these words here and now) were almostly always welcome, not seen as burdens.
But the argument can and has been made that abortion involves some self-rule over one’s body, because the Constitution blocks the government from having unfettered access to your person, place, and things, and it is hard to argue with that on principle. And so abortion has become legal in many places. This is the Yin and Yang of a dynamic America.
Consider how your perception of abortion rights compares to the general mainstream media discussion of self defense and firearm rights, which the Second Amendment expressly says “...shall not be infringed...” while in Pennsylvania our state constitution says the right to own and carry firearms “...shall not be questioned...” Universal abortion rights are presented as absolute and unquestioned, despite being found nowhere in our founding documents or debates, while the mainstream media complex constantly presents private citizens owning guns as completely up for debate, even though this is an actual right expressly enshrined in our founding documents.
This has been a bit of a digression from our initial question above, but the point has to be made, especially for young people: How you perceive yourself and your rights and your freedom and opportunities is largely influenced by the far-Left that has a death grip on academia, schools, and media.
As a loving dad on Father’s Day today, I encourage the young people who have stumbled upon this essay to really consider your future. Think hard and long about the causes of your scary future and the bedrock support most of us get from our family and dad. The political Left and its primary agent, the Democrat Party, is at war with family, with motherhood, with fatherhood, with your economic future and your personal freedoms and choices.
Everyone else is extending a helping hand to you. This essay is my way, as a loving, caring and understanding father, of helping you young people get your bearings. You know this, and you should vote like you know this.
To all the dads out there: Today we all salute you, and thank you, for doing your best to help guide us through our life.
Is the Democrat Party just a big pedophilia group?
Serious question here: Why is the Democrat Party full of so many people who publicly want so badly to sexualize children? And why do grown adults truly want to sexualize children? It can’t possibly be legitimate, so what the hell is this about? Why are we even asking these questions in 2022, and what the hell happened to one of America’s great political parties that it has sunk this disgustingly low?
(Truth in advertising: I used to be a registered Democrat, and in the 1990s, when I no longer recognized the Democrat Party, I left it. This does not mean that I am committed to any other political party, at all.)
When we say “sexualize,” we mean introducing children, like tiny eeny weeny children, to human sexuality, which used to be a private matter reserved for parents at home. And not just human sexuality, like “the birds and the bees” reproduction basics, but all kinds of abnormal or minority/ “kinky” and even violent sexual practices, that are or should be strictly a private matter among consenting adults.
To be fair to these advocates of grooming children for pedophilia, I mean the “professional educators,” they say they are helping kids develop their sexual identity in a healthy way. So that young people can know their truest sexual self at the earliest possible age. These pedophiles, excuse me, educators, say that they are preventing children from becoming unhappy with themselves later in life. Inside every child is a bi-tri-homo-trans-sexual just screaming to claw itself out, they say.
And to all of that I say horeshit. It is absolute nonsense. Nowhere in the history of our species has so much emphasis been placed on sexual behavior as now, and for fifty or a hundred thousand years before all this grooming began, humans did just fine, but in order to make 1% of the population feel most comfortable with itself, we are supposed to sacrifice the other 99%.
The other humans who sacrificed their children were the pagans of the Middle East and Eastern Europe, and these practices are horrific and should never be tolerated. But I don’t think the sacrifice part of this thing is where it is at.
Historically, the age of innocence was a sacrosanct time in a child’s life when “Big Person” ideas and issues were not allowed in, so that children could just be children. Certain ideas like sex, violence, lies, manipulation, and other adult flaws were not allowed to children, for good reason. For a long time, adults in Western Civilization shielded children so they could grow into themselves without being bombarded by adult issues and challenges that will already arrive soon enough. Kids could have imaginary friends, carry teddy bears, talk to themselves, have tea parties with mud pies, and have many years of safe space to just be a kid before the cold realities of life began to trickle in to their awareness.
Civilizations that allowed children to be sexually exploited by adults were always considered barbaric. And yet, somehow, a significant part of America’s voter base is now fully on board with what is obviously pedophilia, in the guise of “education.” What other purpose could this aggressive sexualization of children be for than adults to eventually have sex with those children? It is like open sexual grooming, preparing children to be the subjects of pedophilia, as a plank in a political party’s platform.
Recent examples include Disney’s push to have a more aggressive LBQTABCDEFG agenda forced on children who enter into Disney’s grasp in movie theaters and theme parks, despite recent news reports of quite a few Disney employees being arrested for child molestation. No shame at Disney, apparently, because their CEO just attacked Florida governor Ron DeSantis over an anti-child-sexual exploitation law, the much mis-named “don’t say gay” BS. The Florida law is aimed precisely at preventing pedophiles from grooming children to become sex objects and zero to do with anyone being gay.
Child sex molester monster Jeffery Epstein and his mostly Democrat Party elite child molesting friends had an entire island dedicated to this illegal and revolting practice.
Public school teachers pushing child sex exploitation across America are openly defying taxpaying parents, school boards, and school administrations who are telling them to stop (when the administrators tell them to stop; usually they tell the teachers to keep going). This is not the behavior of an educator; it is the behavior of sex-crazed pedophile maniacs. And the teachers unions are predictably supporting these errant teachers (they are not educators).
And finally, the Democrat Party’s centerpiece, Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Jackson, whose long-term shocking leniency with convicted child sex predators can mean only one thing: She is personally quite OK with child molestation, child pornography, and the child predators who sexually exploit children.
Why aren’t rank and file registered Democrats speaking out about this problem? You know, something like a letter to the editor of East Succotash Newspaper: “Dear Editor, my name is John Doe, and I am a registered Democrat. While I do not support most conservative or Republican policies, I am concerned about the high level of support so many Democrat Party leaders and teachers unions have for sexualizing children. Sexualization of children is wrong, it is illegal in most civilized places, and something is wrong with a political party that makes this subject a focal point. I am unhappy about my Democrat Party going in this direction and I want it to stop.”
But guess what, you won’t see letters like this anywhere. I can’t tell if the registered Democrat Party voters are asleep at the wheel, or sheep-like lemmings that go wherever the party leaders wave them on, or do they actually agree with this crazy stuff?
If Democrats really want to challenge tiny children and get them to grow, eliminate their age of innocence, for the kids’ own interests, of course, then why not introduce them to economics and statistics at age five, so they can grow up into financially and fiscally literate and responsible adults?
If Democrats want to end the mis-use of firearms, and have safer schools, then why not have gun safety training in schools?
These are two legitimate policy subjects that could easily be incorporated into schools everywhere, and that would have tangible results right away. But nope, nothing doing. We just have teachers and school administrators obsessed with turning children into sex objects and props.
It is almost like the entire Democrat Party is just one big pedophilia and child pornography group, sad to say. Prove that this isn’t so. Anybody?
Anybody?
Anybody?
Right, I thought so, and I said so.
Update April 1, 2022: On afterthought, a political party or political movement that stands formally and officially for the killing of children after they are born, for the governmental crushing of individual liberty and dissent by coercively mandating unproven drug injections, for the government to steal children away from their families to be indoctrinated in government schools, for the allowance of pedophilia and child pornography, I could go on, but any political party or movement that stands for these things is really morally bankrupt. This is just pure evil. And for those of you who read this and roll your eyes, wake the hell up. This isn’t the Democrat Party of our youth or of JFK or of FDR. This is an authoritarian, anti-human, anti-freedom Democrat Party unworthy of having the word “democrat” in it. And if you are like me and you are revolted by this political party, you don’t have to join any other party. You can become an independent or a non-affiliated.
Rush Limbaugh
The other day I was driving up I-95 though New Jersey, destination Manhattan, listening to Rush Limbaugh on the radio. The usual analysis of recent events – Nanshee Peloshee’s failed political attack on the American president, the Democrat Party’s disarray of socialist presidential candidates, each trying harder than the other to give away more American taxpayer money to buy votes than the other, the SuperBowl result.
And Rush’s voice was gravelly, something new. Over the past year he has been complaining about having a cold, or a hairball, or whatever stuck in his throat. And over the past year he has taken off more time than usual. Usually that kind of time away indicates a change, usually due to burnout. But Rush would return to the golden EIB microphone and pick right up where he left off, with great energy and clarity. So no, his absences were not attributable to doing the same damned job over three decades.
And then, nearly at the end of the three-hour show, matter-of-factly Rush simply stated that he has been diagnosed with advanced lung cancer, which later on was disclosed to be stage four, which is highly advanced.
Now if there is one symbol of this iconic man’s persona, it is his cigar. Limbaugh enjoys a cigar, and has posed with cigars on the covers of magazines. Promoting, much less admitting to using tobacco these days is the ultimate rebellion, the strongest anti-political correctness statement one can make. Let’s just say, waving a lit cigar about in one’s hand these days gets a lot more attention and dis-approbation than a hairy man putting on scanty lady’s clothes and accoutrements and wobbling up and down a public street in high heels.
Limbaugh has used his cigars as the ultimate rejection of PC nanny state over-reach, to the point where he occasionally almost sounded flippant about the potential health risks.
And while tobacco can and should be enjoyed occasionally – a pipe with a bowlful of cherry Cavendish, a cigarillo, a Dutch Masters or Swisher Sweets mini-cigar, its constant use is anything but innocent. Because the constant use of tobacco products really does damage the human body. Nothing new here to science or human knowledge.
So while Limbaugh may have shared one thing in common with president Bill Clinton, the non-inhalation of lit smoking products, the fact is that cigars put off a huge amount of smoke that, unless one is outside or in a highly ventilated indoor space, is going to certainly invade one’s lungs. Apparently Rush’s lungs were invaded by copious amounts of heavy cigar smoke, despite his not inhaling.
Last night at the State of the Union speech by President Donald J. Trump, Rush Limbaugh received the Medal of Freedom from the hands of First Lady Melania Trump. Rush was obviously surprised that it occurred there and then, and his humility and emotion shone through like a giant airport beacon.
People who hold leftist views may disagree with or even hate Rush Limbaugh. But the level and pitch of their opposition to him is an equal representation of his effectiveness over the years. The first time I heard Rush Limbaugh on the radio was in my friend Kenny Gould’s car in Rockville, Maryland, in the spring of 1991.
“You gotta hear this guy, Josh. You gotta hear what he says. He’s amazing. He is so right. You should hear what he says about Bill Clinton; no one else in the media is saying it.”
And so Kenny turned on the AM radio to the Rush Limbaugh program, and I dutifully listened to what at first sounded like a chatterbox man talking and talking about political and cultural issues.
At the time I had started my first fully professional full time job as a policy staffer at the US EPA in Washington, DC. I disagreed with some of what Rush said that day, but I never forgot him. And years later, when I had discarded my anti-taxpayer job at the EPA like a piece of dog crap stuck to my shoe, because of my own observations and experiences, I had begun to understand just what this big voice on the radio was talking about.
And so tens of millions of other Americans have been educated and trained to think critically and analytically by Rush Limbaugh since that time, and as a result, he has had a tremendously out-size good effect on America.
First Lady Melania Trump placing the Presidential Medal of Freedom around Rush Limbaugh’s neck
More humility than some people might expect caused Rush to compose himself
Good luck to you, Mister Limbaugh. May you have a complete and easy recovery from your cancer. Please don’t be one of those guys puffing away through clouds of cigar smoke with the oxygen line stuck in your nostrils. That just will not do as a lasting image to your greatness. (…and to those who would never listen to Rush’s radio show, how can you say you disagree with him if you do not listen to what he says?…and to those who have openly rejoiced at Limbaugh’s health, you are exactly why he has needed a radio show in the first place, and why America listens to him)
Greta the baby pied piper parrot
Climate change is just the highest profile policy issue where its proponents have failed to persuade people with scientific facts. Instead of trying harder to explain the actual facts, and thereby win over convinced converts, climate change proponents always resort to bullying, shaming, and mocking people who remain uncertain, unpersuaded, unsure of what has been told to them, and then especially skeptical of all the resulting hype and abuse. Think of a teacher who, having failed to effectively explain a subject to a classroom then resorts to emotional blackmail and criticism of the audience. The truth is that the failure to connect with and educate the audience lies with the teacher, or in the case of climate change, its proponents.
Enter the latest unpersuasive advocate of human-caused climate change, the Swedish child Greta Thunberg. Yes, an unremarkable 16-year-old high school drop-out is now the newest face in this highly politicized subject involving multidisciplinary sciences and an entire planet. Yes, Thunberg is a child without any education degrees or really any formal education at all, lecturing and hectoring adults about what they absolutely must do right now with their hard-earned money and freedoms, and just listen to her, dammit.
I have no idea where Thunberg came from, in the sense of how or why she became an activist media darling activist. Nothing about her is particularly outstanding; not charisma, not intelligence, not education or mastery of science. Suddenly she was The Voice Of Reason, or at least The Voice Of Pesky Mosquitoes That Won’t Go Away. This little kid is just a little kid, that’s all she is, so “Oh c’mon!” is what I am thinking.
How can she be taken seriously, how can the quality of our national policy debate have sunk this low? And then I remembered that the face of the big government civilian disarmament effort is an attention hog named Hogg, himself also an unimpressive annoying little foot-stomping brat. And like so many other 16-year-olds across the planet, Greta is a foot-stamping, pouting, demanding little brat who wants what she wants and she wants it right now. It doesn’t mean she knows anything, or that she is correct about climate change, or that my 16-year-old son actually should be handed the keys to my pickup truck and given five hundred bucks for the weekend, either. This is just the way that sixteen-year-olds behave, and real adults ignore them at least and often righteously put them in their place.
Sixteen-year-olds have this habit of wanting all the adult stuff without having actually worked hard and earned it. It is what makes sixteen year olds both exasperating and yet so adorable. They are so clearly in an in-between place, between child and young adult, between having their own thoughts and learning new things. In America, most sixteen-year-olds like Greta are high school sophomores.
Do you remember what the word “sophomore” means? Yes, that’s right, it means “wise fool.” That is, a sophomore is a person who exhibits the traits exactly in between wisdom and foolishness. True to being a sophomore in meaning if not in actual school, Thunberg has the language skills of a young adult, but the reasoning abilities of a child.
The more we think about this unphenomenal child phenomenon policy thing, the more evident it is what a game it is. Thunberg is just the young white equivalent of what Obama represented. If she can’t persuade us with actual facts, she will pout and cry and try to bully us with childish tantrums. And if our adult inclinations kick in, and we contest Thunberg’s bullcrap, why then we are just a bunch of big meanies who made little kids cry. It was the same argument used to buffer Obama from being held accountable for his endless lies — anyone opposing him was racist, mean etc. For shame that anyone would even dare to question these good people! (sarcasm)
And so today was Thunberg’s big day. She led a bunch of American government schools in a student “strike” over her inability to actually persuade thinking people that human caused climate change is real. While students at government (“public”) schools are too young to go on strike, the sound of the word ‘strike’ is so grown up sounding and exciting, and anyhow, it is kind of sexy Marxist chic. Thunberg thinks the strike is better than actually getting an education, and in her own words, climate change policy and socialism are inseparable.
Ah-hah!
And so a bunch of Democrat union controlled government school administrators and political activists posing as teachers actually encouraged their students to miss a day of taxpayer funded education and go do something else, maybe get more leftist indoctrination, maybe protest, against whom or for what none could really say. But a day away from school is what so many kids crave anyhow, and so away some of them went. Maybe some of them want to be just like Thunberg: A high school dropout and professionally aggrieved whiny brat on an endless mission to harangue her elders. Great; it sounds like another Chinese cultural revolution, except now in America by yet more foreigners who want more of our free taxpayer stuff given to them.
Thunberg does not know the science about climate change, but she does know how to parrot liberal talking points. And so maybe we can finally categorize her as a baby pied piper parrot, a malignant force leading small children astray, away from hearth and home and all that is good. I think this description is more scientifically accurate than anything Thunberg says about supposed human caused climate change.
Climate change turned this little human into a parrot
Scary and mean little kid!
“And Duetschland vill haff a glorious thousand year reich!” This angry child is frightening. Is she the next Adolf Hitler in training?