The ultimate comeback for Obamas "we got Bin Ladin" is pretty simple. By we are you talking about SEAL team 6, who your administration leaked participated in the OP and who were targeted by terrorists and later killed in retribution? Or by we are you talking about the doctor that media reports say helped us who is now being held in Pakistan because again your administration leaked?

The real scandal is not that Obama and team lied about a video and a protest for a couple of weeks, that is pretty bad and a real breach of trust. The bigger scandal is also not that he didn't give our ambassador enough security; it shows bad judgement, but the larger scandal is why he was in denial about security in Libya, The real scandal is that he thought the terrorist were his friends simply based on the logic that they should in his mind be his friends and the fact or the reason that he thought they would be his friends is the real scandal; He thought that he was "calming the seas" in the Mid-East, similarly to the way he had promised to lower the seas' level, and a big part of that was his "lead from behind" doctrine. The "lead from behind" doctrine said if we just helped the terrorists to get their own country by using air-power to overthrow their brutal dictator, in this case Gaddafi, then they would go from targeting us to being our ally. The problem was that they were never going to be our ally, not even the way Gaddafi had become our ally after 911 (anyone not actively aiding those shooting at us in "The Dust-bin of History" is an ally) The killing of our ambassador is too big to bury so they needed a distraction, they needed a minor scandal that would only lose them the angry white male vote, a vote they had given up on already. This is why they lied about the video and especially why they had two women do most of the lying; to make the scandal about two women lying about the video would make the angry white males even madder, but it wouldn't hurt their womens' vote as bad as if more attention was drawn to the fact that the reason the terrorists were in control of the streets of Benghazi is because Obama, by himself, and against the will of the congress, used our airpower in an illegal manner. He promised (he bet) that the terrorists would become our grateful allies. Everyone knew they were terrorists (see the news reports at the time) but Obama put everything on this goodwill gesture, which he did on his own without the approval of congress. This approval and support would have been critical if this theory was a good theory because it was essential to the success of this operation that the US be there to make sure that the democratic forces ended up in control. The American people would never have gone for another ground-war another nation-building, but Obama did it anyway when everyone else would have said "Ok, pretend you kill Qaddafi; then what"? but Obama who believes his own speeches, those soaring speeches with the god-like reverberation bouncing off the Greek columns, never stopped to consider that his speeches, his act, and even his underlying ideology are as phony as the Greek columns that his faked-up voice is bouncing off of. We have suffered under this for four years; we are blessed that it has all been laid bare at the same time in October rather than after the election. The question now isn't whether we can use this to beat Obama in the election, the question now is if we can hold the media accountable for this as well.

Who betrayed Bin Ladin?

I was reading an about how Alexander the Great built his power based on either co-opting local leaders or killing them

and it was talking about how he knew he had to do more than just march in, if the local leader fled he had to track him down and kill him and thus our drone attacks in Pakistan and so forth...

Anyway apparently this one guy who Alexander had a hard time tracking down was finally killed by his own wife whom he was in love with and it didn't say why.

But duh, it doesn't follow that she loved him in return enough to want to spend the rest of her life living on survival food (mice, bugs and so forth.

She probably had had her fill of living that way and wanted to go back to how she lived before, which brought me to Bin Ladin.

If you want to try to figure out who squealed on him you have to ask yourself a couple of questions

1 Who did he trust (who was in a position to betray that trust)
2 Who would benefit from him being dead?
3 Were they the same folks?

In other words it was either the Taliban who betrayed him to us or it was the Pakistanis who run the Taliban who turned him in to us in return for us leaving Afghanistan.

Whomever ends up with Afghanistan after we leave is the answer to either 1 or 2 or both. Everyone gets enough of what they want, everyone saves face. And the Pakistanis who run the Taliban even got to pin it on some guys they didn't like no doubt.

Of course these are just thoughts that come into ones head when one is stuck in the head and it is based on total boredom and logic so don't quote it because it is not Gospel, it isn't even gossip, it was probably just gas.

Sen. Bob Casey; all pro-life talk, all culture of death action.

Sen. Bob Casey of Pennsylvania may be talking big now about being against the contraception mandate in Obamacare, but this outcome was well known when he voted for Obamacare so this is just another part of his obvious and well known policy of pretending to be a pro-life and moderate democrat to the PA voters,

But in fact as we know from Bart Stupack, a democrat is a democrat first and then a candidate second. Pro-life is something they mouth in the election in order to get re-elected at which point they go back to advancing the goals of team democrat.

If you care about religious freedom or freedom of conscience then you can't vote for anyone on that team, even for dog-catcher, because even a dogcatcher position is a position and every position provides a "man at arms" in the feudal system that is our modern politics.

In our feudal system it goes something like this POTUS = King, Govs= dukes, congressmen/senators= court followers, local legislators=barons, and everyone lower than that are knights and their followers are "men at arms". Pages are still pages. Battles happen in campaigns and the wins and losses are determined by polls and at the ballot box.

This also applies to the GOP in the primary; an establishment guy as dog-catcher is just one more "man at arms for them" for their great feudal army. So in the primary we must vote for the man, but in the general we have to vote against the army that is violating our religious liberties.

In other words in the general it doesn't matter who the man says he is; we know who he really is by what team he is on. Beyond that there are certain advantages that the majority in congress have in terms of being able to pick who is speaker and set the agenda as well as who is placed on important posts up to and including in the case of the senate who votes on the supreme court candidates proposed by the president.

So no serious Christian can in good conscience vote for any democrat, even for dog catcher until as a party they recant totally and make amends.

Romney; "I'm not concerned about the very poor."

Instead of "I'm not concerned about the very poor" there are plenty of good, true and telling things that Romney could have said in a way that would play well with both the primary voters and in the general,

but what has been exposed here again is that Romney doesn't really understand the conservative position and all he is doing is trying to win a primary,

In the process of trying to win the primary he is making a cartoon of himself by saying things he doesn't understand because he doesn't believe it, but he thinks this is the sort of thing base wants to hear, because this is who he thinks the base is,

but the problem he is having is that the conservative cartoon will not win a general election and if we are smart it won't win a primary and partly for that reason and partly because he will be back to being a moderate with the baggage of having at one point been a cartoon.

There are a lot of intelligent things he could have said if he read the right articles and really understood conservatism, but instead he is projecting this insulting cartoon as a flop to the right.

1 He could have pointed out that the "poor" have more disposable income than the lower middle class

2 He could have pointed out what will happen to the poorest of the poor if the government goes under all the way, all the bennys are cut , and there are no jobs all at the same time

3 He could have talked about what is consistent with their dignity as humans which is that they should work for their bread doing useful work and that all our efforts should be to bring them to that point, not to just extend more bennys to keep them voting for the guy who is giving them out.

But he can't say that because he doesn't really have that in his heart, because he doesn't even know it, because he is not one of us, he despises us and he is probably so proud of his efforts to posture toward us while using ambiguous language that will allow him to slink back to the left as soon as this is sewn up.

That is what this sort of thing tells us, this is why they do it, and that is why we are always forced to defend this sort of clownish posturing that is jumped on by the likes of Rush as "Wow, Romney is really showing some conservatism and we have to defend him" when in reality he is just mocking us, and making us look bad in the process, and because we often fall for it he gets a 3-fer out of it.

If what Romney is is an accurate depiction of the conservatism of the political right then it is not consistent with Catholic teaching. Sure, one can make the tired old case of the GOP tends to have guys who tend to, and that it is the Democrats who are For abortion, For Same-sex unions, and trying to force us to pay for contraception, they are further from the concept of subsidiarity,

and that is all true, and so we have to vote against them, but Romney doesn't give us anything to be proud to vote for either. Newt may have articulated that "we want the poor to get a job, get a better job, and then eventually own that job" but one wonders what Federal or anti-subsidiarity program will be put into place to make that so. Newt is also recently was for Cap N Trade which would create a one-world regulation of carbon.

So I guess this leaves us with Santorum who has recently come to grips with the fact that the neo-con nation-building on sand theory of peace is flawed and may now be the best man in the race.I have to clarify this statement with the fact that the political reality in America right now is that we must either pick the Democrat or the Republican rather than a a candidate from some party that champions subsidiarity because that party doesn't exist

and that right now it is totally unacceptable to back a Democrat given the contraception mandates in Obamacare, the fact they are shutting down Catholic adoption services over same sex unions and so on. Also we must take as a given that the closest thing we have to a subsidiarity movement is "States rights" small government conservatism of which Santorum is right now our best bet.

Entering a "Steered Market"

I was reading recently about the January effect about how if the market does well in January then it will tend to do well all year. I couldn't help but think how in this age of charting and traditional rules of thumb that so much of the market is in continuous reaction mode.

The market is constantly reacting to events in a way that makes Asian Opera seem disorganized. If a certain group of folks had a large wad of cash and knew how to leverage it they could Steer the rest of the market into a buying frenzy.

Crazy? No more crazy than the fact that from 2000 - 2008 the whole economy hung like a loose tooth ready for one good shake, and that the DNC gave it that good shake in time for the 2008 election... and not before. Or if you prefer members of the DNC made sure that the last of a series of market bubbles popped in time to swing the 2008 election.

The bubble existed; all that was needed was a needle and the knowledge of how to apply it. Everyone who was familiar with our banking system knew that the mortgages were wildly out of control based on wildly overpriced real-estate with crazy LTV (Loan to value) ratios. I personally was offered a piece of paper on a house in Californication which would put me in 3rd place, "but hey, how else you going to get that kinda return?"

So the point is that with all the money at their disposal we can bet that the folks who were able to run us into a bear market in 2008 will be able to steer us into a bull market in 2012. That wouldn't make it a real Bull market, just a Steer market.

This is from a post I put on Human events comment section; sorry if it is similar the last post

I get you now Mr. Libertarian; you are a practical (in practice an) atheist who is in love with, or almost worship an idol that you call freedom but could better be defined as radical autonomy.

The difference between freedom and radical autonomy are very important because freedom is the right to do your duty and enjoy the latitude to choose to do things that are morally neutral. That is different from radical autonomy which advances this idea of rugged individuals, but in reality makes every man an island

Marriage for instance to be properly enjoyed must be supported by social and legal pressure as well as morality goodness for goodness sake (or fear of Hell which doesn't cut it in the long run, but it keeps the knaves in line). Now if you think we can have a successful civilization without successful families you are in denial of all evidence ever observed.

Put aside the baby-boomers and how they were able to say "live and let live" and yet still able to follow the law and show up for work every morning. You forget that they were raised in two parent homes (2PH) and taught morals; well not all of them, but among those not raised in a 2PH were more likely to live in poverty, commit crimes and have children out of wedlock.

Now look at their children and tell me that parent involvement from both a mother and a father is not important.I assume you think it is a bad thing to have a class of young men who were never taught the manly arts and are either helpless, worthless or in other ways do not provide value to potential employers.I assume that you understand that a girl who is raised to think that saving herself for marriage is not important, that if you teach her that mindset then she is more likely to act upon your teaching and by the time she senses that she might have wanted to do something else she has two kids with three suspects.

Few things are harder on a family then two dads and a mom per kid. First of all the courts run your life (that is not freedom) Second it is rare that they all agree on rules for the kid. Third the couple is never free of the bio-dad and he is has to pay out until his kid is 18. When same sex couples point to studies that show their kids have similar stats to kids raised in 2PH they won't tell you that the studies used 2PH where the bio-dad was the mothers ex-husband and the man she was living with now was not... the child's bio-dad.

If you believe in evolution (I'm agnostic on it as I like to see science challenged by science) then you can see how important it is to the childrens development to be raised in the balance of their mother and father. They have better mental and physical heath and are more likely to successfully pass those traits on to their children because they are also less likely to be raised in poverty, to join gangs/ commit crimes, more likely to get more education/training, and move up in life.

So what we are talking about is what studies show are the ideal conditions for producing good citizens which comes down to strong traditional families (if you look at the percentages). Good citizens are not a negotiable item in a civilization, it is especially important in a democratic republic where there is more freedom to choose. Libertarians need to understand that if people don't control themselves, historically they have always ended up being controlled by the state.

People are not machines covered in flesh; they are more like flesh you can see which is sometimes ruled by a spirit you can perceive. Libertarian (and socialist) ideology sees only flesh to be trained through reward and punishment. Since they never address the spiritual component their policies never work, and so we don't need to keep trying them.

Here is another post--

"Libertarianism is based on atheism and "radical autonomy" which deny reality of where the man with his radical autonomy came from. A man was once a child, so the "consenting adult" was once a child, raised by a family and within a community to which he owes more than he can repay.

Another problem with the "consenting adult" problem is that the so-called adult doesn't always know what he is consenting to. An 18 yr old girl who stars in a porn movie doesn't always consider how she will feel 20 years later when her sons friends stumble onto that on the internet."

Libertarians are liberals who don't like paying taxes

Libertarians are liberals who don't like taxes and regulations.Liberalism and libertarianism are both based on radical autonomy. If you presume radical autonomy then between liberals and libertarians the libertarians win every time.

However libertarianism will never work because when all the folks who made bad choices, and there will be more of them when bad choices are legal, when all those folks are at the point where they are supposed to be suffering as a result of their bad choices, starving to death and what not, they will not hold up their end of the bargain.

First of all the type of people who make bad choices are not the type of people who hold up their end of the bargain. This is because people who hold up their end are much less likely to make bad choices because they looked at the choice from that point of view from the beginning.

Next you have to realize that right now we have a lot of folks who only do the right thing because the law compels them or because social pressure compels them. Take away the laws and the social pressure will soon follow it "What? There's no law against it!"

So all summer long the ants will be producing and the grasshopper mob will be playing and then fall will come and the ants will be laughing to themselves at how wise they were to lay in a store for the winter, then when winter actually comes the grasshoppers will form into gangs and storm the anthill for provisions.

So how are liberals the same? Well first of all it is important to realize that liberals look at taxes a bit differently. First of all many of them who make good money just don't pay all their taxes; they either cheat outright and figure if they get caught they will pay up, or they get loopholes designed so that all their competitors pay much more. Another group gets their money from government and are fine with paying taxes on money they don't really earn.

Liberals simply position themselves to benefit from high taxes. They also need high taxes to pay for the welfare state which is how they keep the grasshoppers from storming the, well I was going to say anthill, but liberals are not producers. They tax the anthill and keep the ants in line by threatening their anthill will mobs of grasshoppers.

So basically liberals are smarter than libertarians because the libertarian ant, who believes in radical autonomy, but calls it rugged individualism, works his butt off thinking of all he is going to store up for winter, but the liberal termite simply waits until winter and then tell the ant that the majority has voted for high taxes and generous welfare and that he will now distribute the rich ants wealth to the grasshoppers.

Of course the termite is an important leader who has to fly around in a private jet stocked with free drinks and caviar, and have state dinners with expensive food and wine, with the best medical care and on and on.

The poor and budget cutting.

We are looking at America finally being in a position where she can no longer pay the new bills that have been piled on her. There are about enough straws to break the camels back and the DC Ruling class is still adding straws.

It would seem to those of us who have been personally successful in budgeting in our own lives that what is needed is to cut spending, or get a second job, or both. While the federal government can't get a second job they can raise taxes. They can also cut regulations that keep us from tapping our national resources such as oil, coal and farm ground.

The first option of raising taxes will be tried, but it will not work. The first problem is that the lower income half of earners pay no taxes, and will not be asked to get some skin in the game that would connect them to the pain of wasted spending. They would sooner raise taxes on the rich by which they mean anyone who makes more than they do.

In Africa a missionary friend of mine told me they can tell a man is rich because "he has meat twice a week instead of twice a year." The poor in Europe are much better off than that and can hardly be called poor by Biblical standards; the poor in America have a higher standard of living than the poor in Europe. Many have two cars, a flat-screen TV, a a lot of living space. There are exceptions, but this is the rule.

Next, we have the aged folks; as a group they tend to have more wealth than any other group, but they also include those with no means of providing for themselves and no ability left to do so. They are also becoming a group that is proportionately larger than it ever was because of the baby boom followed by the baby bust followed by advances in medicine that have extended many lives.

The population explosion increase in not happening because people are multiplying like rabbits, but rather because we are no longer dropping like flies soon after retiring. The advances in medicine have also make it possible for men to stay in the workforce much longer. Probably less than 5% of the men nearing retirement still work with their hands so if the retirement age were lifted one year, two years or even 3 years it would hardly be an unbearable hardship.

So while a sane nation would cut military expenditures by 1/3 by withdrawing from Libya right away. We could also come to the conclusion that there is no reason to be fighting the Taliban now that we have killed or captured most of the men who plotted against us including their cult leader Osama Bin Ladin. A sane nation would also dramatically cut the amount of money that goes to the fake poor and focus taxed dollars on those who truly are starving and can do nothing for themselves.

But that is not what is going to happen; too many people (the ruling class) have too much invested in the status quo. So those with defense contracts (and interests in the Mid East) will fund publications that will scream bloody murder. Many of them will also undercut efforts to drill for our own oil. The Democrats will lie about cuts, who gets what, and how bad they need it and how incapable they are of surviving without more government money let alone less.

I've noticed the poor have enough money to have turned Mexico into a drug-running Heck hole so I'm just sure that cuts can be made. In the mean time they won't so expect massive inflation, further loss in the means of production, and a bigger debt crisis than ever. If you don't have some means of production now, some tools with which you can produce a product, a place to plant a garden, then I suggest you go out and get them if you can while you still can because some time within the next few years things will get ugly and the only way we will see it through is if there is a population ready to support themselves.

Cut Cap and Balance V.S. Crap, Cut and Run

The fact that Cut, Cap, and Balance was bi-partisan and a total compromise (not raising the debt ceiling at all is the hard right position, anything less is a compromise)

but anyway given that CC&B was bi-partisan and Boehner's bill Crap, Cut and Run, is further to the left and yet not Bi-partisan tells us all we need to know about who was right about the wisdom of putting forth a new bill rather than holding firm and concentrating energy on getting that through.

When CC&B was the plan there was no co-ordinated big push to get the message out, bully anyone who didn't "Get their A** in line", and put the pressure on Obama and Harry Reid.

That tells us that CC&B was never their plan, that was just a bone that they through the TEA Party to get us to move to the left a few steps so that once everyone was more comfortable with a small compromise they could stretch that to what they always wanted.

The TEA Party had the left up against the ropes, they had democrats quaking in their boots and afraid to vote against CC&B, but because the RINOs let on that this was not their bill, and that they would undermine it, the Democrats in the Senate took heart and now they even oppose CC&R.

To put this in Weakly Standard speak the Neo-Con Uruk-hai have captured a few key TEA Party Hobbits and are taking them back to Boehnermon who drank too deeply of big government under Bush and is now secretly in league with the Ruling Class of Mordor of the same.

Ruling class warfare

The TEA (Taxed Enough Already)Party of 2010 created a Republican landslide all throughout the state governments and the House of Representatives, but they didn't get a majority of TEA Party members.

If you consider that the Ruling-Class Democrats still own the White House, the Senate and that half the Republicans in the House of Representatives are either part of the ruling class or aspire to be members then you begin to see why nothing has changed.

We see a lot of hot rhetoric, but the numbers haven't moved. The continuing resolution passed the House after spending cuts of only $62 Billion, which upon further examination was revealed to be $32 Billion and then after the bill was really put under the micro-scope, it came out that the real number was closer to $300 million.

While there was a move to cut spending, cap spending, and vote on a balanced budget amendment, it was clear that the Ruling Class Republicans were telegraphing that they were only going through the motions. They had to give the base some red meat, but they were not going to really put up a fight, they were not going to go all the way and just go back to the alternative which is to not raise the debt ceiling.

What would not raising the debt ceiling do?

1 It would force everyone to stop spending on everything but the most critical priorities.

2 By limiting all spending to priorities we would be able to go line by line through the budget and say hmmm, war in Libya? Not a priority. Social Security checks, pay 'em! Check to Planned Parenthood? Denied! Military pay? Pay the man! Salaries for congress, and so forth? Denied! Programs for medical care for the aged and disabled? Pay it! Budgets for agencies that don't show up to work on "snow days" cut them to the bone or get rid of them!

You get the idea how a prioritization would go. now how about if spending isn't prioritized? Check to Obama's cronies in Planned Parenthood? Obama's man will pay that first; same thing with ACORN. In fact all of the spending that is unpopular with the American people will happen first so that when the money runs out Obama can actually say that cuts in spending will hit the neediest the most.

This is not true now though; we could stop all spending until all spending is prioritized, or we can continue to run up spending for programs that at best do not help the poor or the needy. This means bigger debt now and less for the real poor and needy later. So anyone who cares about the poor and needy is for cutting spending now.

What about just raising taxes on the rich? Well first of all taxes are never increased on the politically connected because they are able to get special treatment from their cronies in office. They get loopholes, they get special contracts, and they get regulations that favor them over their competition. Next after a certain point the more you raise taxes the less you get, and partly that is because you ruin the economy and without a strong economy you cannot fund this level of spending.

The politically connected and their buddies in office, by which I mean the DC establishment or "Ruling Class" need the spending to be so big that it can't all be tracked so they can hide the amounts they are funneling to their cronies. This is why all their posturing is all talk. Big Government is their family business model. Until we really engage in class warfare against the "Ruling Class we will never get to the root of the problem.

Debt ceiling the GOP's fault

There is no doubt in my mind that no matter what happens in regards to the debt ceiling/overspending/default the New York Times and their gang will not blame Obama. Also it can be known ahead of time that no matter what happens all or part of the GOP will be blamed.

The liberal hardliners in the media used to get more done by reporting on a center-right country from a center-left position and thereby moving the positions incrementally to the left. Now with the rise of Talk Radio/Fox/and Blogs the liberals have lost their monopoly and they have had to push harder to get the same leftward movement.

The strategic telling of the truth has almost been thrown out and the only time we get the truth out of them is by accident or because the facts are so well known that they can't get away with it. At that point they either ignore it or tell the part of the truth that is well known but put a spin on it with a sob-story, a false study, or an opposing quote from some leftist with a website and a fax-machine who poses as the leader of a large group.

Since we cannot trust the media in this debate we need to gather the facts and say who is in the wrong, right? Well the first set of facts we should look at is that Obama has taken spending as a percentage of GDP from about 20% and raised it to 25%. Historically Federal spending has ranged from 17% to 19% and it cannot go above 19% without crushing the productive sector.

So if you want to look at symptoms you would say that the economy is having a heart-attack and needs an aspirin. If you consider that the patient has not taken care of it's health we could say that the republicans propose to fix the economy by giving it an aspirin. The democrats want to give the patient a combination of donuts and lard as well as half an aspirin.

Neither side wants to get the patent onto a diet and exercise program; the patient wouldn't vote for that! What constitutes a diet and exercise program in our analogy? First of all it will not work to do across the board cuts of all programs. True, all government programs would be forced to adapt the efficiencies of the productive sector if their budgets were cut, but across the board cuts are like mowing your lawn; at first it looks great and by next week it is right back!

The real problem is the concentration of government into a huge centralized government that has way to large of a population to be responsive or accountable to those who vote. We have to distribute power back to the states, the states need to redistribute their power back to the local level. Then what doesn't work can be identified and gotten rid of and things that work can be put in place.

So maybe in a way the Old-line GOP is to blame because they keep the game going while pretending to be an opposition party. They are the folks who were fine with partial birth abortion so long as they could look good voting against it and using it as a fund-raising issue against the Democrats. In the same way they need big government waste fraud and abuse so they can be against it, but they never get rid of it by returning the power to the states.

And you will also notice that they are also almost all part of the "ruling class" which is the group of "crony capitalists" who get rich through inside access.

The only argument FOR Gay Marriage is religious

Gay Marriage proponents like to claim that the only argument against gay marriage is religious; in fact the only argument For it is basically a religious one.

To explain we must first consider normal marriage; I call it normal because persons attracted to the same sex make up less than 5% of the population, perhaps as little as 1.5%.

If you prefer you can call it traditional marriage, but that would be like saying that night is the traditional time for sleeping. No people in any place nor at any time had homosexual legal unions of marriages up until now.

But as I was saying let us consider normal marriage and its' benefits to society. Perhaps we should add that we are speaking of one man/one woman "till death do they part" as anything else doesn't really benefit society.

The man and wife who are bound by vows are the best unit possible for producing and rearing children, and if you are familiar with our current economic situation where we have all the baby-boomers retiring at once without an ordered replacement then you know that children must be produced.

Of course children are really only an economic boon to society if they are law-abiding, well adjusted, and willing and able to pull their own weight. Otherwise they are just as big a drain or worse than the old boomers whose jobs they are supposed to be filling as the boomers retire.

This means that broken homes and other situations where the situation is less than the children being raised in a balanced manner by their real mother and father, well these situations are not as good (statistically speaking) for raising a kid who will benefit society.

The studies that show this doesn't matter are book-cooked by liberals with an agenda. They use divorced and re-married mothers to get worse stats for children raised in strait marriage families. The information is so tweaked that it is worse than worthless.

So basically same-sex unions don't benefit society, and in fact the benefits that they say the have a right to cost taxpayers. This means that not only is there no reason to grant them this special right it actually costs us money and we get nothing in return for it.

So the only reason they have left is that it is the right and just thing to do in their opinion. We should be nice to them and extend the benefits of marriage to them. If you say we should do it because it is "the right thing to do" or that we should do it to be nice, or just then you are basically trying to make a religious or moral argument for why you should get something from us.

As for your right to get married you have the same right to get married as a straight person does; you can also get married to a person of the opposite sex. As to your argument that old people can't produce kids, but can still get married, why don't you try to get the law changed? Go ahead and make your case, just try not to be so preachy, people don't want to hear that sort of thing.

Hey Egypt; Rome wasn't built in a day!

Rome wasn't built in a day. We can take that to mean a few different things. Obviously it was a few hundred years from the time the legendary founding fathers were raised by wolves to the time Rome became a contender. But the mythology is not what people are really referring to when they talk about building Rome.

Rome was a city state blessed with citizens who had the simple moral courage of soldiers and an admiration for what is today called education but back then was called Greek Philosophy. Greek philosophy and learning meant studying everything from science to warfare to the virtues to happiness and the meaning and purpose of life.

We are sometimes shocked at the things they held that we have dismissed, but we should also be shocked at the things that the Romans and Greeks as Pre-Christian peoples were able to figure out about the natural law without divine revelation.

I suppose the reason Rome is great has as much to do with her fall as her rise. The government of Rome had become so large and so centralized that just as we see today in our centralized government and our centralized corporate structures the corruption, fraud and abuse kept growing until the Roman government became weak and the peoples had to look to themselves for defense and regulation.

The Roman empire came into existence through a series of military conquests that were essentially nationalistic in nature.Rome was able to stay an empire for hundreds of years because their young men were taught duty and service. As the ideal of nationalism became exposed the Roman empire weakened. It would have broken up completely except that the average citizens had rediscovered virtue, service and meaning and purpose in life in a way that the Greeks and Romans could only theorize must exist.

Basically they had discovered Christianity; or at least many of them were beginning to discover it. Many moderns point to the American Revolution as the beginning of freedom and then they point to the French Revolution as the next step and so on, but the truth is that Christendom, or what is now called Europe, was from her beginning more free than her contemporaries. It is a modern conceit that we are sure that we today are more free than those old Catholic countries.

Our First problem is our idea that freedom can only happen in a democracy. Actually freedom can happen under most forms of government, and moral peoples who live under a good King actually have more freedom than we in a democracy. Another problem moderns have is our idea that voting makes people free and that a democracy is always better than a dictatorship.

Dictatorships can be horrible; that is not the question. The real question is if the dictator is overthrown who will be the new dictator? Chances are usually pretty good that if a people are ready for freedom tomorrow they wouldn't be living under a dictator today.Next time you take your dog for a walk notice that he stays in front of you by watching your ques as to which direction you want to go. An alien for another solar system might think that the dog is leading you, but that is rarely the case.

The European civilization that rose out of the ashes of the Roman Empire wasn't built in a day or even a century. If you want to replicate European civilization first you have to look at the rock it was built on; you can't buld a civilization on sand.

Favorable policies non-kosher lables

Probably the best way for us to enshrine favorable policies is to accept non-kosher labels. We need to accept the use of different terms to approach different people. Neither the Left-Locke nor the right Locke is familiar with subsidiarity. The Left will probably think it refers to big business and the Right will just think it is a new shade of lipstick for the old socialist pig.

In the old days when all media spoke with one voice those who identified with the left end of the scheme or the right end of the scheme all saw the same stories the same political ads and quickly fell into party lines. Now that there are media alternatives there is an opportunity take people from either party aside and talk to them about how their goals can be partially furthered and a more sensible system built.

For instance, "local and sustainable" is necessarily small and probably family owned. In order for a small business to survive under current conditions it needs "help" to the left this has always meant subsidies, but a more efficient way for the government to help very small businesses is to take away some of the government burdens imposed on business.Exemptions on red tape for businesses that employ only family and sell all their products locally could give many small local farmers and artisans the ability to compete with Assembly-line goods from mega-corps.

After all the "protections" that government inspecting and licensing arms provide are not as necessary if you know the guy who grew your food or made the product you are using. Nor is there any need to redistribute wealth away from small-time operations, many of which are run by semi-retired senior trying to make ends meet on social security. We could even all agree that there shouldn't be any income tax on goods that are sold and consumed by the end user within the state of their manufacture (or if manufactured in a border town within 100 miles, whichever is greater).

That would please those who are worried about fuel consumption and sustainability; it should also please those who are worried about the credit system shutting down. If more people can make something of worth, or have extended family that can, then it means that more people will have a meal ticket if the credit markets shut down.It also should please conservative federalists who don't feel the Federal government should be regulating commerce within states.

There are a thousand points upon which agreements could be reached that would further a culture of subsidiarity point by point. It can't be built overnight anyway, even if had to be, but the time could soon be approaching when it will be needed and the real question is will it be there? If more people can see the rightness of it as well as the benefits, nay even necessity of it then this could begin to take off.

They just need to see it from their point of view and for that we will need different strokes for different folks. Don't re-fight the old ideology wars, stay focused and this can happen fall off to the right or to the left and it will just be absorbed by one of the two parties and become part of the ideology of 50% of the country and bitterly opposed by the other half.

Co-ops; the future of American manufacturing?

Co-ops; the future of American manufacturing?

Could the manufacturing co-ops of Mondragón, Spain be the model for manufacturing in America in the future? Under current conditions it seems unlikely. America’s vast natural resources have made capitalism the perfect exploiter; men of vision were induced to develop, invent, and risk because the rewards were beyond any prior experience.

After these men of vision had built their dreams on a combination of capital, guts, and skill, not to mention cheap immigrant labor, they had created so much wealth, so much infrastructure that in a democratic country it was impossible that the less rich voters would not figure out how to vote themselves some of that wealth.
And it wasn’t just the wealth alone that had become concentrated; it was the power to control or to at least manipulate the market that had concentrated to the few.

Teddy Roosevelt “broke up the trusts” or at least make a show of it, but in reality he had nothing against a few companies running a whole industry so long as it was controlled by a government he (and his super-evolved elites) controlled.
Thus his cousin F.D.R. allowed pluropolies. “Allowed” is not the right word, he forced smaller businesses out of business so as to better control the few remaining large businesses. This was seen as an efficient way to harness capitalism to create wealth, but regulate it, so as to distribute the wealth that was created. The promise was “every man a king” and in terms of standard of living the average man had access to most of the material goods kings had and a whole lot more in terms of medical treatment and so forth that many kings died not having.

The socialist harnessing of capitalism under F.D.R. did not end right away but continued on until the Clinton administration. During the five decades before Clinton capitalism went from being harnessed to being abused; rather than simply increasing the standard of living and maintaining that standard, it became the American dream to do better than your parents - bigger house more cars and therefore more money. The wages became so much greater than in the third world that it became impossible for American manufacturing to compete with third world manufacturing and its low wages.

A culture that has developed over decades, generations really, can’t be reformed overnight. The culture I’m talking about is the “worker” vs. “the wealthy” class warfare culture that led the unions to destroy their hosts. G.M. workers were getting as much as $80/hr in compensation and their CEO was getting a package just as absurd; figuring out how long it would take for the parasites to destroy the host was like a big mathematical story problem. Once the unions and the management left the station and started picking up speed it was just a matter of time before they collided with overseas competition.

When the common people are used to wealth and they can vote, they are not going to accept any sudden lowering of their standard of living that they can vote away. America, despite her reverses, still has great natural resources and a lot of infrastructure. This means that our dollar, which the 2nd world (Europe, Canada, Australia, and Japan) as well as the 3rd world (everywhere else) is still highly invested in can still be exploited. America, or the Obama administration, will print dollars into existence until the rest of the world won’t play that game any more.

When the rest of the world sees the game is unsustainable then they will demand payment in natural resources and they will get back a percentage of what they put in because payment will be in ever inflating dollars that will have ever decreasing value. The dollar printing game will be over for good. Then it will be hard to get credit, jobs and even food. When it is hard to get food the formerly fat Americans will try to figure out how to make a living without capital, and they will be hungry enough to be humble.

They will be willing to try anything that could work and they will look first to what they know has worked elsewhere. This is why we Catholics who believe in the Mondragon idea, the idea of co-operative ownership, or employee ownership of the company, need to adapt the Mondragon model to American culture and law. Then after such an adaptation we need to offer to assist a start-up co-op in one of the hardest hit areas.

Perhaps we could start a financial co-op that would loan the money to start a manufacturing co-op preferably in the South. I would like to see a wide group of people each put a small amount of money into the financial co-op with the knowledge that the first two or three attempts might run up against resistance from the state, from lawsuits, from the competition, and from unions. It also might be difficult to get Americans to adjust to the idea of solidarity when we are used to looking out for Number One. I would further propose that the financial co-op be run as an American branch of the Mondragon co-op system and the first co-op would be started under the guidance of folks from Mondragon.

Next the men who form the manufacturing co-op need to be men who have worked in manufacturing before and not a bunch of writers and dreamers who probably won’t really work at all, let alone work together. Such folks would be likely to use any imperfection in the co-op as an excuse to cause trouble and even quit. Beyond that they might not have the skills and abilities to work well with their hands as well as the knowledge of the technical aspects of modern manufacturing.

Thirdly, I would propose a top of the line online school so that workers could learn from home without interrupting their work, taking them away from their family or running them into debt. Unlike most technical schools this schooling would have a bit more of a university feel and would leave the student not as “well rounded” as a great books school, but certainly with a bit of the basics of science, history, economics and theology.

Forth, we need to start co-ops now, but we need to get legal protections similar to how corporations were declared “legal persons”. This could be done by getting laws passed, but another way to do it is by developing “case law”. Of course if case law doesn’t go our way we would have to go the legislative route, but the legislative route needs to be proceeded by a groundswell of support. So continuing to get the message out is important, but now is actually a good time to start the ball rolling here in the states.

Maybe we could start in a manufacturing ghost town in a Southern state that has a freshly emptied factory and a ready trained unemployed workforce. If the corporation that has gone overseas won't sell because they don't want competition, then buy the empty factory through eminent domain.Your average conservative will object on private property principals, but what of the rights of the workers who helped build the company, the town that built up around it that is now left high and dry? Yes the company should be justly compensated, but also they should sell.

It should be a small factory in a town that has no other industry. The industry should be one that is still viable. The workforce should be educated and in total agreement with the co-operative system. This is do-able.

To faze out the income tax

To faze out the income tax is a better idea than abolishing it. First of all if you are really interested in getting rid of it then you have to realize that it will create a radical change and that Americans tend to reject radical change. Secondly getting rid of it at a single stroke would leave a whole lot of our most vulnerable in the lurch; folks like our seniors and disabled vets who paid their dues and now deserve our support.

Many professionals like bookkeepers and accountants have built up their life around the income tax and would have to start over with no warning or easing into it. Many business models rely on servicing it and so forth. In other words too many people and their families would be ruined today if the income tax went away today. You might not be sympathetic to their plight, but you should be sensible to their opposition and how desperate you want to make them.

My proposal therefore is to turn the income tax collection, and the services provided by the income tax, over to the states.From that point it would be much easier to faze out a state income tax than a national one. While all the states might start out with the same rate and system within a few years the states would begin to compete for ranking in efficiency and rates would lower.

As the ideal of subsidiarity gains ground there will be a snowballing effect as families redeem their responsibilities from the government. Parents armed with better teaching software will tend to take on more of the education of their children. Now that everyone realizes that the baby boomers are going to bust the government retirement idea we will see more families figuring out how to handle these issues on their own.

Now that the safety, nutrition, and supply of our food has come into question, people have become more interested in growing their own and buying it locally from folks they know. This means less need for the government to have their nose in it, and therefore less need for government. Other than our imported food it is hard to make a case for much of the "inspections" that go on because the companies that produce the food have a greater stake in avoiding media exposure than the government union drone with his rubber stamp.

As to our national defense I think most of the cost of it has to do with the fact that we think we can always make things better by sending our boys overseas. Once we realize that knees on the ground in most cases is more effective than boots on the ground in combating evil, we will send more prayers and less boots overseas. The remaining costs can be raised in the way we used to fund our military with tariffs and a hybrid army of paid professionals and trained volunteers.

The times do not allow for a small military, but we could do much with quite a bit less, especially considering how many of our citizens are armed and what could be done with reserve and national guard units.There are almost no other needs that can only be organized at the national level, and actually the states could be required to keep a proportionate number of state guardsmen at the ready in a standard of readiness overseen by the federal government. This would aproximate the medieval model of knights maintained by nobles who were under a King thus limiting the power of the King (or in our case the federal government)to do anything but organize against an invasion.

Freedom of religion is a gentlemen's agreement

Freedom of religion is a gentleman's agreement. It was never meant to mean anything goes; if that was the case then it would make it virtually impossible to enforce any law, because anyone who wished to break that law could simply claim exemption because it violated their conscience.

No, freedom of religion was a gentleman's agreement arrived at by the Founding Fathers as a way for all of the differing Protestant denominations, the Jews, and even, gasp, Catholics to live peacefully. It wasn't that hard of a sell because under the British government this was already the order of the day.

The mistake the Founders made was in not keeping with the tolerance of reasonable accommodation that the British had arrived at; oh no, they were revolutionaries, they had to put into practice the latest fad in liberalism, an open-ended freedom of religion.

At the time that they believed this stupidity they didn't have any dealings with Muslims; in fact, Thomas Jefferson was shocked to find a few years later that Muslims wanted Americans to pay tribute because they were Christians, or at least not Muslims.

At the time there was another idea that was current and that was that all denominations should essentially have a battle of ideas and that the denomination with the best case would rise to the top in a free-market of ideas.

Again the folks with these ideas did not reckon on the Muslim approach; Islam doesn't rely solely on convincing arguments but on conversion by the sword or by persecutions involving a special tax, lack of legal standing in court in case of a dispute with a Muslim, etc.

The modern Liberal has added another layer to this gentlemen's agreement; the agreement to disagree. This "let's agree to disagree" philosophy sounds good at first, but what it really is saying is that nothing we believe is worth arguing over. Along with an unhealthy philosophy known as multi-culturalism, this is why the claims of Islam are not being cross-examined with the same adversarial zeal which other faiths have faced.

It is after all the claims and practices of Islam where the weakness is; the whole religion could collapse in a few generations if it was subjected to the same scrutiny that Christianity is constantly under. Let's try the Historical-critical method on it, let's look at the authenticity of its claims. If Christians offer the test that Jesus was a liar, a lunatic, or Lord, then let's ask the same question of Islam - did it come from a liar a lunatic, or the Lord?

I will later write on what criteria we can ask the liar, lunatic or from the Lord question of Islam, but even to raise the spectre is enough to start a conversation, so go start one.There is nothing stopping you; after all, you don't need to build a Mosque overlooking "Ground Zero" to start a conversation.

Rulling class V.S. Productive class

There is an important, nay I would say “watershed moment” article: • American Spectator: America's Ruling Class. And the Perils of Revolution - Angelo M. Codevilla .It lays out the case that a “ruling class” has emerged in America, but more than that it defines who they are, what they are and how they rule the “productive class” or the other side in this struggle.

In the article Codevilla calls the “productive class” the “country class”, but I feel “productive” is both more accurate and less confusing than “country class”. After all, we don’t want people thinking you have to live in the country or listen to the music coming out of Nashville (which is at a low point just now with the loss of Johnny Cash.)

This article is important because in the past members of the productive class first thought that all of the nonsense currently going on was just the problem of liberals, then democrats in general, and then democrats and liberal republicans. While in terms of elected officials it is a problem of liberal democrats and republicans, the bail-outs revealed a whole infrastructure of unelected members of this group.

The 2008 bail-out revealed that instead of representatives, we have a cabal in power that is using power to grant mutual back-scratching privileges to each other payable by the general public. While everyone has railed against the bail-out and the crony capitalists who privatize profits and socialize losses there lacked a focus, or group to appose.

Besides the obvious politicians and czars it also consists of folks who profit from the expansion of government through grants, subsidies, or in the case of big business, contracts, bail-outs, special laws and rulings that favor their company at the expense of the competition. This can even be restrictions and red-tape that cost the favored company more money, but in the end are profitable because it forces their competition out of the business. The mainstream media or big media is owned by parent companies that are “big businesses”. Also don’t forget the “frivolous lawsuit rich” nor those who occupy profitable positions in “non-profits” nor heads of national professional groups.

This "Ruling class" term is a great catch-all for all the folks who are loosely affiliated or in ca-hoots; it also explains why the expulsion of God from the public square is necessary for their power. This term defines a group that until now had escaped definition; but now that they, their tactics, and motives have been identified and reduced to a single named group, they can be stopped. By explaining how they maintain their power, Codevilla has given us the key to destroy their power.
They maintain their power by perpetuating the myth that they are superior and that we are inferior; that the little retrogrades need them to step in and stop the ignorant from hurting themselves and others. That they have “evolved” beyond the commoners and we are lucky they are so benevolent as to use their powers for good; good being defined as making society and people evolve or “progress”

Anyway read the article and the next time you are talking to an “NRA democrat” who votes union-democrat or the like, instead of having the old discussion about whether it was the “D”’s or the “R’’’s who lost our manufacturing base, got us into wars only to lose them, has us wrapped in red tape, created an unsustainable debt, destroyed our educational system or any of the other failures the ruling class is responsible for you can point him to this new concept that Democrat and Republican are different only in matters of degree; the real distinction is between the “ruling class” and the “productive class”.

If a guy can’t understand that concept it is probably because he is either a member of the ruling class, one of its’ aspirants, or one of their useful idiots. There are also those who are still POW’s of the Sexual Revolution, are part of the “Endless War” (especially in the Mid-East) lobby, or in some way benefit more than lose from big government. I wouldn’t waste my time trying to convince them, prayer is their only Hope.

Molesting Pope Benedict

It looks like the Atheist in the AP and the Perversion Activists who run the New York Times are commemorating Holy Week by molesting Pope Benedict.

"It is not the nature of the evidence but the seriousness of the charge" and that is apparently why it is more important to run headlines that simply repeat the charge.

The articles below the headlines never pay off; they simply talk in a parallel way about some pedophile or pederast priest and at the same time talk about the Pope in a way that seems to link them.

Only in the last few years have we come to understand that a certain part of any male population have a mental defect that leads them to be pedophiles. During the 60's and 70's certain liberal seminaries lowered the bar to keep their numbers up.

Also they were more concerned with "not judging" because in their heresy, being judgemental was the worst possible sin.Some of them welcomed the idea of "Judging is the worst sin" because the sins the were committing themselves were quite interesting.

What they didn't know was that the therapy and the therapists they placed their faith in could not rehabilitate people with this kind of a mental disorder. I tend to think that rehab has pretty much come to be understood for what it is (mental punishment.) Mental punishment cannot deter people who are insane; if you keep expecting a different result it just means more victims.

So to sum it up;
1 Priests are males

2 A certain number of any male population are pedophiles

3 They can't be cured or fixed

4 If given therapy and released they will do it again and again

5 They were released after being declared cured and safe by therapists

6 The Pope was in positions of leadership during these times.

Now the part that they don't talk about is that

1 The Pope never engaged in a repeated catch and release

2 The Pope was the most active in taking steps against the abusers

3 The Church has notoriously high bar for Church trials and it takes a long time to do anything because they are also concerned with the rights of the accused who might be innocent.

4 Pope John Paul II was used to the communists falsely accusing every good priest of as many crimes as they could think of; this made him the worst possible person to deal with this particular issue. It wasn't until then Cardinal Ratzinger stepped in that these cases began to be dealt with at the top levels of the Church; before that the local bishop dealt with it.

5 The press is all interested in selling stories, or stories that sell. It makes their job easy if they can run something sensational that they didn't have to prepare because it is soon-fed to them by a lawyer who is suing the Church.

6 A great deal of the press is angry with the Church because we are the last great pillar to stand on all sexual morality.

The good news is that this has caused a great purification of the Church