Waking the Dragon

This piece, in the Iowa State Daily blows me, and anything I might have to say about it away. Written by Barry Snell, a gun owner and user, the piece is an indictment of the anti-gunners as liars, not only about the role of guns in American society, but even worse about gun owners. I don't recognize myself when I read the things anti-gunners write and say about gun owners.  I also don't recognize the motives ascribe to me in their writings. Go read Snell: Waking the Dragon-How Feinstein Fiddled while America Burned. So, I'll just let Snell tell his story, and hope people will go read the entire article:

I’ve come to realize after the Sandy Hook shooting that the reason we can’t have a rational gun debate is because the anti-gun side pre-supposes that their pro-gun opponents must first accept that guns are bad in order to have a discussion about guns in the first place. Before we even start the conversation, we’re the bad guys and we have to admit it. Without accepting that guns are bad and supplicating themselves to the anti-gunner, the pro-gunner can’t get a word in edgewise, and is quickly reduced to being called a murderer, or a low, immoral and horrible human being.

snip...

Gun people don’t trust anti-gun people because they tell us they don’t want to ban guns, only enact what they call “common sense gun laws.” But like a magician using misdirection, they tell everyone else they want to ban every gun everywhere. While some are busy trying to placate us with lies, another anti-gunner somewhere submits a gun ban proposal — proposals that often would automatically make us felons for possession. Felons, for no good reason. And you anti-gunners can roll up your grandfather clauses and stuff them where the sun don’t shine. If it ain’t good enough for our grandchildren in 60 years, it ain’t good enough for us right now.

snip...

Gun people don’t trust anti-gun people because when it comes to their “We need gun control to save the children” argument, many of us can’t understand how an anti-gun liberal can simultaneously be in favor of abortion. Because you know, a ban on abortion would save a child every single time. I’m personally not rabidly against abortion, but the discongruence makes less sense still when the reason abortions are legal is to protect a woman’s individual rights. That’s great, but does the individual rights argument sound familiar? Anti-gunners think that for some bizarre reason, the founding fathers happened to stick a collective right smack dab at the top of a list of individual rights, though. Yeah, because that makes sense.

snip...

Gun people don’t trust anti-gun people because they are purposely misleading to rile the emotions of the ignorant. We don’t trust anti-gunners because they say more than 30,000 people are killed each year by guns — a fact that is technically true, but the key piece of information withheld is that only a minor fraction of that number is murder; the majority is suicides and accidents. We don’t trust anti-gunners because we know accidents and suicides don’t count in the crime rate, but they’re held against us as if they do.

snip...

Gun people don’t trust anti-gun people because they’re fine with guns protecting the money in our banks, our politicians and our celebrities, but they’re against us using guns to protect ourselves, our families, or even our children in schools. Legislative trolls like Dianne Feinstein cry havoc about me protecting my life, while standing comfortably behind armed guards —and the .38 Special revolver she got a California carry permit for. We don’t trust anti-gunners because they tell us our lives aren’t important, or at least are less important than the life of some celebrity like Snooki, who can have all the armed guards her bank account can afford.

snip...

Gun people don’t trust anti-gun people because in a single breath they tell us that the Second Amendment is irrelevant today and should be repealed because semi-automatic weapons didn’t exist when the Bill of Rights was written, then turn around and say the First Amendment protects radio, television, movies, video games, the Internet, domain names, Facebook and Twitter. Carrying liberal logic on the Second Amendment through to the First Amendment, it would only cover the town crier, and hand-operated printing presses producing only books and newspapers, and nothing else. Even anything written with a No. 2 pencil or ballpoint pen would not be included. And those of you belonging to religions that formed after the 1790s? You’re screwed under liberal logic, too.

snip...

Gun people don’t trust anti-gun people because anti-gunners insult us for our opposition to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (aka the “ATF”). We don’t trust anti-gunners because we know the ATF is hardly a law enforcement agency but is really a glorified tax collection agency that has abused, ruined the lives of, or murdered dozens of innocent gun owners through overzealous enforcement of gun-related tax and paperwork regulations. Just ask Louis Katona, Patty and Paul Mueller, John Lawmaster, Tuscon Police Lt. Mike Lara or any of the dozens of other victims of criminal ATF agents. Where was the ACLU for all that? And it doesn’t help that President Obama tried to appoint known anti-gunner Andrew Traver to be the ATF director. Check out the ATF’s “Good Ol’ Boys Roundup,” “Project Gunrunner” scandal and their loss of department guns for a little F-Troop entertainment sometime, too.

finally...

We want the crime and killings to stop as much as you do, so to my fellow citizens who are anti-gun I say: So long as you deny our humanity, so long as you malign our dignity, intelligence and wisdom, so long as you seek to shade us under a cloud of evil that we do not partake in or support, so long as you tell us that because we own guns we are terrible people, you will prove yourselves absolutely right in that we won’t come to the table to talk with you.

I want to send out a tip of the western hat to Sean Sorrentino of the blog "An NC Gunblog."

We are just One Spree Killing Away from Expanded Background Checks

I said in my recent post entitled Gun Owners Not Out of the Woods Yet that Senate Majority Leader Reid plans to bring up his bill, S. 649, along with all of the defeated amendments, including the Toomey-Manchin amendment at a later date. Now, Neil McCabe has the inside baseball account of how Reid's Maneuver Sets Up Anti-gun Measures for Quicker, Easier Passage at Townhall.com.

According to McCabe, the gun grabbers are just waiting for another spree killer to get the public panicked about guns again, and then they will strike.  These people have no sense of common decency, and therefore any shame that others might feel about dancing in the blood of innocents does not even occur to them.  I hate to sound like a broken record, but none of the proposals on the table at the moment would have stopped Sandy Hook, or any other spree killing that has occurred in recent history.  The facts have been pointed out to them numerous times.  They know the facts, and yet they persist.  Some, like Carolyn McCarthy may have tragic backgrounds that prevent them from believing the facts.  But most, like Senator's Feinstein and Schumer understand, but they persist.  It is difficult to credit such actions to any but bad motives.

The word "infringe" which is only used once in the Constitution, if I remember correctly, means:

1: to encroach upon in a way that violates law or the rights of another <infringe a patent>

Now, a legally required background check before you are allowed to purchase a weapon infringes your rights by virtue of providing a prior restraint on your right to keep and bear arms.  If we take as an analogous case, the restriction on the 1st Amendment that you can not yell "fire" in a crowded theatre when there is no fire, that is not an example of prior restraint.  You can yell "fire" in a crowded theatre all you like, but if you do, and they find that no fire was present, you will be prosecuted.  This would be the same thing if anyone could purchase and bear whatever arms he chose, but if he assaulted or murdered someone with those arms,  he would be prosecuted.  In fact, this is what largely obtained before the Civil War in the country.  But because of the prior restraint on the purchase of guns, the background check becomes an infringement of the 2nd Amendment.  Similarly, if you had to ask permission before you said anything, and that permission was granted only if it fit with what a beauracrat wanted you to say, that would be analogous to what we have now with background checks.

If you wanted a background check system that doesn't violate the Constitution, it must be private, it must be voluntary, representing good and best practices among gun dealers.  Interestingly, I think that for their own self protection, gun dealers should perform background checks and refuse certain people according to their own sense of risk.  At most, the State might provide a database that the gun dealers could use to check up on persons they are suspicious about, or the gun dealer could use private background checks on the web, as many employers now do.  As to records, it probably would make sense to keep records for a minimum of 7 years, though I can see using the average purchase to crime time of 14 years as well.  But again, these decisions would be private, and the government could not access any record without a warrant.  Most of these provisions could be enforced not by government agents, but by liability insurers, who might insist that those they insure followed the guidelines of something like a National Gun Dealers Institute.

I know what you are going to say: "If a voluntary effort would have been Constitutional, why wasn't there a organization and best practices already set up?  Why did the government have to step in?"  It may seem a long time ago, but it has only been a generation or so, that people used to understand that guns were inanimate tools, incapable of moral agency.  Nobody expected a gun to just jump up and shoot someone on its own.  It was understood that the man that wielded the gun was the moral agent who determined if it's usage was for good or evil.  It was understood that the seller of the gun had no moral capacity, or legal claim to read the minds of those purchasing guns to refuse to sell to them.  Finally, there was no way to know a person's record, unless he was a very famous outlaw, and then...

In today's litigious society, with computer access to data about nearly everyone, I think it highly possible that some sort of voluntary effort would have developed.  But the government chose to short circuit that by setting up licenced dealers.  Of course, they did this not to protect dealers, but to gain control of who had guns, and where they are.  That's why they take advantage of any high profile shooting to try to advance their cause.  That is why they ignore the 2nd Amendment, and they hope you will too.  

Psychological Warfare on Americans

William A. Levinson again has an article at the American Thinker that you should take a look at.  Entitled The Beggars Mafia it reveals that what has been called "dancing in the blood of innocent victims" is really immoral psychological warfare. Those who are not prepared for it will surely fall victim to it. The real "beggars mafia" are a group of violent and amoral criminals in India who chop off the limbs of children in order to exploit them as beggars' props. Who, after all, seeing a child without an arm or legs, could resist.   Levinson makes clear that the modern day blood dancers don't go that far:

Barack Obama and his anti-Second Amendment allies, unlike the real Beggar Mafia, obviously had no hand in the deaths and injuries that they now seek to exploit. There is, on the other hand, ample proof that they are glad these deaths and injuries happened. Identifiable people in their camp have expressed open gratification that Adam Lanza slaughtered more than two dozen innocent people. Their own words provide far better proof than any argument that could possibly come from the National Rifle Association or other Second Amendment advocacy groups.

He then goes on to quote specific luminaries, including Rahm Emanuel, Ed Rendell, and of course our favorite Mayor Doomberg. It is obvious that these people are salivating over the fact that a mad man went into a gun free zone with a gun and killed so many children. Mayor Doomberg even expects another such event to spark still more gun control. But if you look at the situation in the cold, hard, light of reality, you will see that it is people like them, elected officials, who have set our children up for random slaughter by creating gun free school zones in the first place. For them now to say that we need more gun control, when it was the gun control their predecessors put in place in 1990 that caused the problem takes a great deal of chutzpah.

Levinson goes on to note that this type of psychological crime has been going on for at least 100 years.  He notes:

The Glorious Leader's exploitation of Sandy Hook families is strongly reminiscent of William Allen Rogers' cartoon of Woodrow Wilson with the "little lost children of the Lusitania." It has been proven, by the way, that the Lusitania carried rifle ammunition whose sole purpose was to kill German soldiers. Rogers' psychological crime therefore helped murder more than 100,000 Americans along with countless Germans with whom we had no legitimate quarrel. Compare the following Rogers cartoon to the Glorious Leader's cynical exploitation of Sandy Hook survivors.

Yes, that great Progressive President, Woodrow Wilson used the American children killed during the sinking of the Lusitania to get the public stirred up to go to war with Germany. Trouble was that the Germans were correct. The Lusitania was carrying war materiel to England, to use against Germany, and using the passengers aboard as human shields. Much as the blood dancers today, who know that their proposals will do nothing to prevent violence...gun or otherwise...Woodrow Wilson got us into a war we had no business fighting, and had full knowledge of the actual situation.

A corrupt group of people are doing their damnedest to stampede us into panicking so that they may pass another infringment of which the Constitution says may not be infringed.  We can not let them do it, and if they do, they must understand that we will not disarm, will not register, we will resist.

Political Correctness is Killing Us

Keith Riler has an article up at the American Thinker today that I hope you will read entitled Void of Reason. I have pointed out before that we arrived at the point of writing our Constitution the way we did, with limited government and maximum freedom for the individual to act because of a long chain of philosophy going back to the fact of that man on the Cross, Jesus the Christ. Reason requires clear thinking, and reason requires clear and precise language. It is the opposite of the unthinking "banality of evil" that Hannah Arendt wrote about after observing the Adolph Eichmann trial. This is what "politically correct" language is, a way to avoid thought, a way to make euphemisms stand for reality. But I digress. Here is how Riler starts his article:

If you missed it, President Obama gave a twelve-minute speech at the abortion giant's annual gala, and finished with, "Thank you, Planned Parenthood. God bless you."

How can God, who gives life, and therefore is the only one with a right to take it away, bless the murder of innocent babies either in the womb, or outside of it? I had a "debate" with a what is euphemistically called "pro-choice," but which I call pro-murder individual the other day. The individual stuck to the notion that the child inside a woman's womb is not a person. This kind of "thinking" flies in the face of every scientific principle we know. It also flies in the face of Biblical and theological thinking. It even flies in the face of American legal thinking. For if a child in the womb is a person, and there is no scientific evidence that the mating of two people will produce anything else, then that person is entitled to life, and thus the protection of the law.

Eichmann's thoughtless linguistic fictions were the mechanism by which Nazism achieved its humanity-denying distance and requisite alienation. Nazis gave us "terminate, liquidate and evacuate" for murder; "cleansing" for killing; "bacillus" for Jew; and, "resettlement" for death camp. Loading Zyklon B poison gas pellets from the roofs of Auschwitz gas chambers was antiseptically procedural, but it was antiseptically procedural murder. On a related note, Gosnell's dirty late-term abortion operation is a disgrace, but Tiller's antiseptically clean late term abortion clinic was deemed model healthcare for women.

Abortion ideologues have likewise given us the fictions of "potential human being," "product of conception," "pre-embryo," "fetus," "fetal tissue," "fetal matter," "medical waste," "garbage," "parasite" and "punishment" for baby and human. One abortion doctor described an abortion as a "defense mechanism ...against the local invasion ...and deleterious effects of the parasite." Like Eichmann, they are aware of the results of their actions. They are not mentally ill.

Political correctness infects nearly everything today, and it is poisoning our minds by turning hard realities into nice sounding phrases. The government's spending for example becomes "investments." Investments are good. Investments create wealth.  As everyone knows, a successful investment earns a return on the investment. In other words, it is expected to make money. But government spending has never earned any money, or created any wealth, it only takes money out of the economy. As such, it can only be seen in the clear light of logic as a necessary evil.

Terrorists become freedom fighters. But of course freedom fighters do not cause deliberate injury and death to noncombatants, while for terrorists, the death and destruction of innocents is precisely the point.  In the clear light of logic, there is a huge difference between the two.

Illegal aliens become undocumented workers. Undocumented workers implies that all these people need to do is obtain drivers licenses, social security cards, perhaps a passport, and they would be would be fine. It ignores that they have first and foremost broken the law, and therefore are criminals by definition.  In the clear light of logic, we must provide consequences for breaking our laws if our laws are to be respected.

Political correctness is not a new phenomenon.  The so called progressive income tax, with the idea being to brand a flat tax as regressive, is not progressive at all.  It is, in fact manifestly unfair to those who earn more that they should be taxed at a greater proportion of their income than those who earn less.  Likewise to place the label "regressive" on a flat tax is to make it sound like it is penalizing the poor.  But note that a flat tax fulfills the requirements of Marx's axiom: "From each according to his abilities..."

Those of us who are working for a restoration of the Constitution must make an effort to say what we mean in clear language unfettered by political correctness.  I heard a man say the other day that abortion is nothing but murder, and I cheered.  Murder it is, despite all the euphemisms used to make it sound like something else. 

Jesus gave us freedom in order that we might show the world the true face of God

On April 6, 2013, I wrote a post noting that the Army, in a briefing to a Pennsylvania Reserve Unit had equated Evangelicals and Catholics with radical Muslim groups such as Al Quaida and Hamas. I noted that the difference was that radical Christians didn't kill people. That alone should have made them realize the huge difference, but today at the American Thinker, Trevor Thomas goes further in an article entitled Radical Christians vs Radical Muslims. Thomas notes that radical Christians have gone to the far ends of the earth to provide education, healing, and comfort to the down trodden and the poor. Christians routinely operate soup kitchens for the homeless. Catholics operate 1,100 hospitals in the US alone.

Thomas takes us on a tour of these various missions, highlighting the work of people like Jim Elliot who evangelized the Quechua Indians, or Millard and Linda Fuller who founded Habitat for Humanity.  He notes the great universities, the first hospitals, all founded by Christians, and contrast these with Muslims who seem bent on filling those hospitals up.

What Thomas doesn't say, because his is a national audience, is that Catholic diocese and Protestant Churches operate child care centers, elementary, middle, and high schools.  My own congregation runs an early education school.  My grandson goes to a Baptist day care center.  Hundreds of local Christians provide the volunteer logistics to gather and transport donated foodstuffs to the local food bank, and stock and distribute food to needy families.  My own congregation also provides through donations, school supplies so that poor kids have a backpack with notebooks, pencils and pens, paper etc when the go to school.  The people who do these things do them quietly, because they feel called to do them.  Jesus gave us freedom in order to perform good in the community, to show people the true face of God, and that is what radical Christians have done. 

So, there you have it.  These people are your radical Christians.  Interestingly, they would do more if government got out of the way.  Unlike groups like Planned Parenthood, they do not take a dime from the government.  Which would you rather have in your community, radical Christians, or radical Muslims?    

What Would You Do?

The American Thinker today has a piece asking the question: Does there yet remain some bit of American occupied America? Robert T. Smith has the article at The Sheep of Watertown. The Boston area was the cradle of American freedom and liberty, yet what we saw on display in Watertown last week was a tyrannical police state run amok. As you read Smith's article, please click on the links he provides to videos that show uniformed and fully armored thugs going door to door and pulling people out of their homes at gun point, without warrant, and treating them as common criminals. This should be very disturbing.  Smith:

Most disturbing was to watch the nameless and faceless domestic paramilitary forces all "ninjaed up," going house-to-house, conducting warrantless searches. So much for the Constitution's 4th Amendment protections. Residents were aggressively forced from their homes at gunpoint, physically pushed from their properties, ordered to put their hands over their heads, and personally searched on the streets, while their homes were subject to search without consent. The footage found here, as an example, should disturb any American in the alleged land of the free.

This is what happens when you so severely restrict the 2nd Amendment rights of people that they virtually can not own a gun.  The Boston area has some of the lowest gun ownership rates in the nation, and as a result, their other Constitutionally protected rights are not respected either.  This is what comes of giving up freedom for the illusion of security.

I would also note that no less than the New York Times described the Boston bombers has having "a small arsenal" of weapons. Yet there is no curiosity from the lamestream press about where they might have obtained those weapons. Massachusetts has some of the strictest gun laws in the country, yet these men were able to obtain them apparently quite easily. Isn't anyone curious about how and where they obtained them? Senator Feinstein? Senator Reid?

People used to understand that the police were merely citizens who had been specially trained in criminal procedure, detecting crime, forensics, as well as crowd control and beat patrols.  Your local policeman was a resource in time of trouble.  In cities, the officers often walked the beats and got to know the people who lived and worked on their beat.  In smaller towns...well...everyone knew everyone else anyway.  Then, in 1967, Los Angeles formed the first Special Weapons and Tactics squads, called SWAT.  They trained in military style tactics, to root out the worst of the worst of criminals.  But something else happened as well.  As this style of policing spread across the country, the police began to not only employ military style tactics, but to think of themselves as warriors on a battlefield in which the "thin blue line" stood against society itself.  It was an "us versus them."  We the People have become the enemy.

Smith again: 

It is hard to justify or condone the sudden transition of your fellow citizens -- the local smile-and-wave, protect-and-serve police force -- to the enthusiastic thuggery depicted in this type of video. As Harry Reid admonished us in the recent gun rights debates, "I'll vote for the ["assault weapons"] ban because maintaining the law and order is more important than satisfying conspiracy theories who [believe in] black helicopters and false flags."

Perhaps Senator Reid and his Democrat cohorts didn't observe the black armored personnel carriers on the streets of America, or the excessive magazine capacity in use by the domestic paramilitary. Perhaps Senator Reid and his cohorts didn't see that the domestic paramilitary possessed truly automatic assault weapons of war, which they pointed at We the People as they went door-to-door during these forced evictions and searches. Perhaps the number of rounds fired well beyond the 10-round magazine capacity determined to be enough by Senator Feinstein during the shootout with the bad guys didn't register with these progressive senators.

The fact of the matter is that jihadis can strike anywhere there is a large gathering of people. The purpose of terrorism is to terrorize the people into acquiescing to the political demands of the terrorists. Thus random, unexpected acts of terrorism will continue to happen wherever there is perceived to be a soft target with plenty of people around in condition white, as were the spectators at the finish line of the Boston Marathon. Thus this aggressive, jackbooted, police state can be expected to descend on anyone. What will you do when it happens to you?

Girding Our Loins, and Going After the Gun Grabbers

The other day, I ended a post, Not One More Inch by saying:

We believe in freedom, in liberty, and we believe those telling us how to live should mind their own business. We can compromise on certain things, for instance how long it will take us to return to a balanced budget. But we can not compromise these fundamental principles. Not one more inch (and oh, by the way, we are gunning for all those laws that infringe our rights.)

Apparently, the gauntlet has been picked up by William A. Levinson at the American Thinker in his article Gun Bill Defeat is Not Enough today. The desire to be left alone to work, play, raise our kids and live our lives without constant interference from an overreaching government means that every time there is a call to arms, we are there, but after the emergency is over, we often return to our lives, our kids, and continue until there is another call to arms. Levinson's point is that this must stop doing things the way we have been. We can not simply defeat bills, while leaving the gun grabber's organization and people in place, plotting to strike again.  Rather we must go on the offensive, and destroy (politically) these people's organizations, and their political careers. Levinson:

Incrementalism is the process whereby an aggressor extorts one seemingly small concession after another, which is how Hitler acquired all of Czechoslovakia before his prospective victims finally realized that they had to fight him. Only a fool believes that negotiation or appeasement make an incrementalist's words, whether "Today Germany, tomorrow the world," or Rep. Jan Schakowsky's (D-IL, wife of convicted felon Robert Creamer) "assault weapons today, handguns tomorrow" mean anything other than what they say. The appropriate response to the recent attempt, and success in Connecticut and New York, to emasculate the Second Amendment is the moral equivalent of total war against the perpetrators as endorsed by General Curtis Lemay.

snip...

We cannot, of course, use nuclear weapons (as advocated by Lemay) or even conventional ones to settle political disputes in a civilized nation. The legal and nonviolent destruction of entire organizations is, however, on the table, and the same goes for political careers. In 2000, I helped expose the anti-Second Amendment Million Mom March's misuse of tax-exempt money for electioneering. It was not my intention to debate our Constitutional rights with the group, which had a no-debate policy anyway. It was not my intention to merely stop the Million Mom March temporarily. It was my intention to destroy the Million Mom March as an organization by discrediting it to the point where its own members, donors, and corporate sponsors walked away from it in disgust. The organization liquidated in October 2001, and its current incarnation is not the same corporate entity.

In the recent fight over guns, the gun grabbers ( and here I include advocates of "universal background checks") used made up statistics (90% of Americans support background checks) and lies (this bill doesn't allow the government to set up a National registry) to persuade the uninformed voter to support this bill because having a "universal background check system is the holy grail for the gun grabbers. Most people who have never bought a gun do not realize that these things are already illegal despite what Bob Beckel would shout on The Five. With such a system, they would be able to incrementally make more and more people "prohibited persons." Meanwhile, they could justify doing so because, as the know full well, the criminals class would seek weapons on the black market from shady people selling guns out of the trunk of their cars. Clearly, if our "universal background check" didn't catch the next mass murderer, then we need to go further will be the reasoning.

The potential list of targets for actions described by Levinson is vast.  The Joyce Foundation and Mayor Doomberg's Mayors Against Illegal Guns (MAIG) are two such groups.  Unlike the NRA, which boasts between 3 and 4 million* members at any one time, the Violence Policy Center and others are relatively small, and receive grant money from foundations such as the Joyce foundation to push anti gun propaganda.  MAIG in particular looks to be a target ripe for a take down.  Of course, MAIG has received grants from the Joyce_Foundation as well.  Of more immediate use is how many of the mayors have been convicted or accused of crimes, particularly gun crimes.  If someone in the MSM could be convinced to point out the hypocrisy of these mayors, it would serve a useful purpose.  Merely having David Codrea talking about it is not enough, as powerful a voice as he has, he is one man.  Meanwhile, Mayor Doomberg recently said:

"No, I think that's right this time. But that doesn't mean you're not going to come back again," Bloomberg said. "Keep in mind we're likely to have more tragedies like you saw in Connecticut. Each one of these builds on things."

This is dancing in the blood of innocent victims, and Mayor Doomburg should be condemned for it at ever turn, until the Mayor and his organization MAIG is destroyed politically.  We have a lot of work to do, and its time we gird our loins and get with it.  Perhaps Senators Schumer and Feinstein are sitting in protected seats, but that doesn't mean we can't make their lives miserable. 

  *The NRA does not divulge its membership lists, but journalists have estimated the number from 3 to 4 million.  Unfortunately, whether they estimate high or low, they are missing the point that the NRA is funded by actual people, whereas the gun grabber groups are largely made up of one or two people funded by foundations such as the Joyce Foundation.