Savage Republican

I’ve always liked Dr. Walter E. Williams. He has a great, dry sense of humor. Plus, he makes the complex simple.
In his recent column( article ) ,once again, he makes the complex simple:
“Private property would solve the smoking issue. Suppose you owned a restaurant, and you didn’t wish to permit smoking. How would you like it if people used the political system to enact laws that forced you to permit smoking? I’m sure you’d consider it tyranny, and I’d agree. But there’s symmetry. It’s just as much tyranny to use the political system to enact laws to force a restaurant owner who wished to permit smoking to ban smoking. The liberty-oriented solution might be to post a sign saying you don’t permit smoking, and customers wishing otherwise wouldn’t enter. The same principle would apply to restaurant owners who wished to permit smoking.”
Try telling your left wing friends this and see how they respond.
Reminds me of a quote I heard from JFK: “What’s mine is mine. What’s yours is negotiable.”
And interestingly enough, I found that the whole quote is: ” The freedom of the city is not negotiable. We cannot negotiate with those who say, “What’s mine is mine and what’s yours is negotiable.” It came from an address to the people of the United States regarding the crisis in Berlin that eventually lead to the erection of the Berlin Wall a few months later ( article )(I remember seeing live TV of an East German soldier stringing concertina wire across an intersection that Sunday in August 1961) . JFK was telling the citizens of America that we could not negotiate with those who have the perspective of tyrants and despots.
Well, I certainly agree with him. I have no desire to negotiate with those who want to force me to give what I wish not to give and they are not entitled to.
It’s called liberty.

I don’t know about you, but as I get older, I’ve been discovering certain things about truth:
1. It’s usually pretty simple. Now, I don’t ever confuse simple with easy. As an example I was asking a group of young Bible students what was the 2nd highest mountain in the world (these kids are pretty smart, so I wanted to plumb the depths of their knowledge). They were a bit stumped, so I told them it was K2. I then asked how does one get to the top? One young lady said “Climb”. Now, I was heading for “put one foot in front of another until you’re at the top”. But her comment was, well, simpler. So I then asked them if climbing the to the top of the 2nd highest mountain in the world was easy? They all replied no. But I told them it was simple. Never confuse the two.
2. The truth is usually fairly straightforward, direct. No shilly shallying.
3. It is resolute. It is unchanging. Beliefs may change. The truth doesn’t.
4. As a consequence of #3:Truth is usually hard and not too uncommonly painful. It destroys all that is flung against it and therefore causes pain as reality takes over the fiction or the lie or closely held belief.
5. However painful,it is also liberating. Realization may be painful, and liberation also is usually found to be painful.
6.Because of this pain, very few people ever really seek the truth. Oh, they say they do. If asked the question “If you were wrong, would you want to know?” everyone would say yes. But were that the truth, there would be no left wingers. And no RINO’s. As a very good friend of mine once said “You can not be well informed and intellectually honest AND be a left winger”.
7. I usually find that when I discover a truth, it suddenly is so apparent, like I did know or at least should have known it all along.
And number 7 brings me to why I wrote this blog piece.
I was doing an internet search and came across an article from Kentucky about the fact that gun buy-ups don’t work. And preceding the main point of the article I came across this small piece of truth:
“The natural assumption among adults living in this Commonwealth is that when we formulate public policy that affects the lives of all our citizens we’ll be guided by facts and knowledge as adults should be, and NOT by emotions or childish fears. This is, after all, what adults are supposed to do.” (Article here ).
And as I read it, it occurred to me that this was the truth. Simple, direct, to the point.

I have had this in my “pending” file since before Christmas.

The Minneapolis City Council, rather than tackling crime in their fair city (see Rambix for all the stories) has dedicated $300,000 in order to “study” whether a streetcar line would be a useful form of mass transit. The thing that got me was the first line of the article. The reporter gave the readers an unintended (I think) insight into the city council’s mindset when she wrote:

“Minneapolis has a desire named streetcar.”

The reporter continued to gush about the history of streetcars in Minneapolis and quoted Mayor Ryback:

“We’re looking to add more energy to our main streets,” Rybak said Wednesday. “It puts us on the cutting edge of American cities, but ironically it also grows out of the city’s history. Minneapolis grew along streetcar lines, and that’s part of what created the charm of our neighborhood commercial districts.”

What the Mayor forgets though, is that trolleys would run (according to the city’s plans) on streets that are already over croweded with car, bus, pedestrian and (in a couple of places) light rail traffic. Adding more vehicles to already crowded streets is a recipe for disaster. Since the day that the light rail trains started running, we have had several train/car accidents that have resulted in many deaths. Remember, we are talking about a mindset where people drive their cars out on to thin ice because they “didn’t want to walk that far”.

The last thing the City of Minneapolis needs is trolley cars fighting for space on Washington Avenue or Lake Street Mayor Ryback. Instead, let’s focus on getting the petty thieves off of the streets of Minneapolis so that the suburban residents who work and visit in your city aren’t afraid to meet the same fate as this person, this person and this person.

Now our friends over at Anti-Strib have cornered the market on the dark side of Islam, which is one reason why I have stayed away from the subject, but there was a side to this story, that I didn’t know if the men over there would pick up on which is why I decided to post on it.

“And earlier this year Australians were outraged when Lebanese Sheik Faiz Mohammed gave a lecture in Sydney where he informed his audience that rape victims had no one to blame but themselves. Women, he said, who wore skimpy clothing, invited men to rape them.

A few months earlier, in Copenhagen, Islamic mufti and scholar, Shahid Mehdi created uproar when – like his peer in Australia – he stated that women who did not wear a headscarf were asking to be raped.

And with haunting synchronicity in 2004, the London Telegraph reported that visiting Egyptian scholar Sheik Yusaf al-Qaradawi claimed female rape victims should be punished if they were dressed immodestly when they were raped. He added, “For her to be absolved from guilt, a raped woman must have shown good conduct.”

I only have one thing to say…. WHERE ARE THE CRIES OF OUTRAGE FROM THE NATIONAL ORGANIZATION OF WOMEN????? Their silence on this speaks volumes about the American left…..

Update – Sequel over at Anti-Strib has a post this morning on this Times Online story…

“a Sharia judge who has ordered the punishment of women for not wearing headscarves, was uncompromising: “The tsunami was because of the sins of the people of Aceh.”

The silence you hear is the response of the American left….Womens rights???? What womens rights????

I found this story to be very interesting and heartening all at once. Couple that with this study and you have to wonder – is academia really coming to a realization about itself? Could the day actually be here when academia admits what conservative parents and students have been saying for several years now….that there is a decidedly leftist lean to academic America?

According to the Klein/Stern Study, the estimated ratio of Democratic leaning professors to Republican leaning professors in the social studies/humanities faculty (across America) is a stunning 8:1! Now this ratio is smaller is certain fields (mathematics and economics for example) but face it parents, your kids have to take social studies and humanities in college – they are going to be exposed to this in the classroom!

What’s that you say? Surely the teachers don’t bring their personal bias into the classroom? Not according to “a survey of students at 50 top universities showed that nearly half the students feel faculty use the classroom to present their personal political views, and that political discussions seem ‘totally one-sided’.”

Some other gems from the San Francisco Chronicle article:

— Moderate U.S. Sen. Lamar Alexander — a former university president and one-time Secretary of Education — told the Commission on the Future of Higher Education that the greatest threat to broader public support and increased funding for higher education is a “growing political one-sidedness which has infected most campuses.”
— The American Council of Trustees and Alumni, in its recent report “Intellectual Diversity: Time for Action,” said “the most serious challenge for higher education today is the lack of intellectual diversity.”
— Earlier this year, the broad-based American Council on Education issued a statement, supported by 30 higher education organizations, acknowledging the growing concern about “intellectual pluralism” and the “free exchange of ideas” on campuses.

The self proclaimed bastions of diversity are any BUT diverse when it comes to thought. The consumers of education (read – students and their tuition paying parents) have got to start holding these universities and professors accountable.

It will be interesting to see what (if anything) academia does with this information. If they truly care about diversity (of race, creed, color etc) then they need to care about diversity of thought. Can they do it????? We’ll see. If they do, it will finally be nice to see the elites practice what they preach!

Nine months ago, I was invited (by my friend Savage Republican) to embark on an adventure that I happily accepted. That adventure was to join him here at Savage Republican blog.

I would like to take the time to give my thanks to all of you: to Savage Republican and Amendment X for asking me to join you on this adventure. To Duane at Radio Blogger, a big thank you for the opportunity (via the Blog of the Week competition) to gain new friends and readers. To our readers, thank you for making us part of your lives and thank you for the votes to make Savage Republican co-Blog of the Week (with our new friend Andy at Residual Forces). To our friends in the Armed Forces, I thank you for your service and sacrifice and I pray for your safety and swift return home. To my friends in Louisiana and Mississippi, I pray that next year is much quieter (from a storm standpoint) and I pray for your swift recovery from the storms this year.

To all of I you, I wish the happiest of holidays. Merry Christmas, Happy Channukah and Happy New Year to all. 2006 is going to be a busy year, with the mid-term elections on the wing. I wish you all health, happiness and much joy (and maybe even a new Republican Senator for us in Minnesota?) for 2006.

Mark Simone, of WABC radio, covered something interesting on his show yesterday. He was talking about the broadcasts of “Tokyo Rose”. Tokyo Rose (for those who are products of the public school system) is an amalgam of 5 female broadcasters (on Japanese Radio) whose propaganda broadcasts were specifically designed to demoralize the Allied forces in the Asian Theater. Mr. Simone (according to a friend of mine who listened to the broadcast) mentioned that the writers of these broadcasts did studies (on POW’s?) designed to determine what would have the most adverse effect on our troops. Their top 3???

1. The president lied to get the US into the war
2. The real reason the president took the US to war was to profit large corporations
3. The war is not winnable [for the US]

Does any of this sound familiar dear readers?????

This is exactly what most parents have against the “teaching establishment”! A substitute teacher in the Lickdale (PA) public schools decided that it was her duty to tell her class of first graders that Santa Clause didn’t exist.

Theresa Farrisi stood in for (Jamey) Schaeffer’s regular music teacher one day last week. One of her assignments was to read Clement C. Moore’s famous poem, “A Visit from Saint Nicholas” to a first-grade class at Lickdale Elementary School.
“The poem has great literary value, but it goes against my conscience to teach something which I know to be false to children, who are impressionable,” said Farrisi, 43, of Myerstown. “It’s a story. I taught it as a story. There’s no real person called Santa Claus living at the North Pole.”

Well you’d better get out of teaching now, Ms. Farrisi. If you have such a problem teaching this “false” story to children, there will come a time in your teaching career, when you will have to teach on such fictional works as Aesop’s Fables, The Brothers Grimm, Romeo and Juliette, The Odessy and the Illiad. Part of teaching is teaching children about fictional stories (like A Visit from St. Nicholas) and teaching them about real people (like our Presidents and other news makers).

Schaeffer got off the school bus later that day, dragging her backpack in the mud, tears in her angry little eyes.
“She yelled at me, ‘Why did you lie?’” recalled Jamey’s mother, Elizabeth. “‘Why didn’t you tell me Santa Claus died?’”
Elizabeth Schaeffer said she was appalled by Farrisi’s bluntness.

I hope you are happy Ms. Farrisi….you’re actions interfered in this parent’s relationship with her child. Pray that no one ever does this to you and your children (should you have any).

What’s worse is that now, Ms. Farrisi is trying to cover her tracks – she knows she was wrong!

“I did not tell the students Santa Claus was dead,” she explained. “I said there was a man named Nickolas of Myrna who died in 343 A.D., upon whom the Santa Claus myth (is based).”

However the kids in the class tell a different story…

“The teacher stopped reading and told us no one comes down the chimney,” Jamey said, curling into a ball on the couch, bracing her chin on her knees, her voice shrinking away like melting ice cream. “She said our parents buy the presents, not Santa.”

Here is a news flash for all of you teachers out there! Your role (in the parent/teacher/child triumverate) is to partner with, not usurp, the parents authority. You are to teach my child reading, writing, science and math! If my child believes in Santa, the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy, Buddah, Allah Jesus Christ or whomever – it is not your job to interject YOUR VALUE SYSTEM into the way I am raising my child! It is not your business to tell my child that his/her beliefs are “a myth”.

Ms Farrisi, you stepped way over the line here. It is not your place to override the parents of these children! You owe the parents of these students a big apology.

I hope you are happy, Ms. Farrisi. You ruined this Christmas for these children. I hope you sleep with a clean conscience tonight!

I came across this article reading from World Net Daily Devvy Kidd’s column . Kidd makes the point that I’ve made for years that taking money from you to give to them is sinful, wrong , evil and immoral. That if the Feds (and states) left us alone, the American people, the most generous people in history, would give to the Salvation Armies of the world that do a FAR better and moral job of caring for the poor than the Feds or states haver ever or could ever accomplish. EVER! Another article about private vs. government charity here and especially here , which is real vs. false, destructive charity.
But, the article I refer to is one that Dr. Walter E. Williams has also written about in this article . The real deficit is not $8,000,000,000,000 . It’s so large that estimates run from a low of $37,000,000,000,000 to a high of $75,000,000,000,000. And Social Security is a mere percentage. Medicare and Medicaid are the monsters that will sink us all.And the new Medicare Prescription Drug Act will add another $5-7,000,000,000,000 to that during my lifetime.
All Congressmen (Reps and Senators), all have access to this information. There will be no surprise. It’s coming for sure. We’ve had a few opportunities to stop this. We may, repeat MAY have just one more.
We do have a few lessons from history. After the French Revolution there was an currency (economic) crisis. There was at least one currency exchange. It didn’t work. There came a man who promised to end this crisis. His name was Napoleon Bonaparte.
After WWI the huge war reparations were crushing Germany. The government solution? Print more deutsche marks. Inflate their way out of the debt. And inflation reigned down on all the citizens. One incident I read was that a man in Germany had saved enough to send his son to the university. Four full years. When the inflation hit, all his son’s college fund could buy was just one meal when he was ready to go to college.
And government is not the solution.That’s like asking Ted Bundy to run a dating service.
If you think for a moment that governemnt is the answer, see how the Feds took a recession in 1929 and turned it into a depression here . Oh, and by the way, the same article shows how the Feds brought about the original market correction (called Black Monday, 28 October, 1929). It’s a complete read, but well worth the time to set history straight.

I’ve mentioned Dr. Walter E. Williams many times before (The E. being quite important). He is an economics professor at George Mason University. He has a talent to take complex economic principles and make them fairly simple and understandable.
In his recent article (The consumer rip-off ) he started me thinking about a conversation I had with my deeply committed socialist buddy (his answer to the disaster and economic tsunami called Social Security? An estate tax at 100%. He hasn’t come up with a solution to its dwarfing counterpart Medicare…and now its bastard brother the Prescription Drug Act). Anyhow, Dr. Williams talks about the economic concept of large but narrowly defined benefits vs. small but largely dispersed costs. He uses sugar and dairy interests to show that a few people (sugar beet growers and dairy farmers) get huge benefits from price controls and tariffs but we, the consumers, pay more for the products, but not enough for us to organize and change the law. But read the article. He does a much better job.
So, here we have two special interest groups. Groups that work against the interests of you and me. We have to counter with a group that will look out for our interests that will counter these specific assemblages.Which brings me back to my socialist friend.
Painting the walls in his garage a few years ago, we started talking about the Constitution. His take, of course,is that the Constitution is a living document. That the Founders could never have predicted or seen an economy like this, or whatever. I said that the Constitution was never about economics but was about the hearts of men. It was meant to counter the evil tendency of men to accumulate and concentrate power.
We talked about the most infamous tyrants of history (He was shocked when I told him that Stalin killed more people than Hitler. And that 8,000,000 Ukrainians starved to death thanks to the failure of central planning (read concentrated power) under Stalin. And Mao Tse Tung killed more then Stalin and Hitler together, including starving to death 20,000,000 Chinese in the failed Great Leap Forward-central planning). I then asked what did Mao, Stalin, Pol Pot, Saddam Hussein, Idi Amin, Mohmar Khadafi have in common? Centralized, concentrated power. And he had to agree. I then pointed out that he made the comment that we had to get corporations out of government. I said that was simple…get government out of corporations so they don’t have to try to protect their interests.

I then asked him a cogent question: Why did people and organizations contribute money to Congressional and Presidential candidates? His answer was that they were trying to buy influence. I asked why were these people and groups trying to buy influence. He responded that they wanted certain things or wanted to change or keep certain programs, and so on and so forth.

I said no, that’s not the reason. The reason that these people and groups were trying to buy influence was that there was influence to be bought. That the 10th Amendment was there to make sure that there was NO influence to be bought. That a Congressman could only say to a potential influence buyer “Well, I’ll take your campaign contribution, but of course you know that my Oath of Office ONLY allows me to do what’s outlined in Article 1, section 8. No dairy price fixing, no sugar tariffs, no honey subsidy, no agriculture subsidies, no welfare payments of any kind, personal or corporate. No corporate regulations, no EEOC, no OSHA, no FDIC, no FICA. So, thank you, with that understanding!” Yah, like that will ever happen. Except with Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas. Read about him here and his columns here ). Dr. Paul is the ONLY Congressman who filters all bills through two layers: Is it Constitutional (meaning he honors his oath of office) and then does it conform to my campaign promises to my constituents?

And so, we now have competing interests that reflect the will of the majority, a democracy, with no Constitutional control. Where the 2nd Amendment is quite clear, I need to ask the government for permission to defend myself. Where the Constitution is quite clear that all taxes are to be apportioned, we have an unConstitutional Karl Marx tax scheme (and read about a REAL shocker concerning the Federal Income Tax read here ( go down to “The Theory” and click on the link “Read the news article…”!). Private property is not private. Their bills and our counter bills and their guys change that bill…and it all becomes jury-rigged in a functional democracy where we constructed to be a constitutional republic.

So, why do I buy malts? Because there are malts to buy because there is a free market for malt suppliers and buyers. And I like them.

However, I buy these malts legally…at least for n
ow.