A Confession and a Pledge to Action

I have a confession to make folks.  I have been one of those who have prosecuted the conservative ideal through gentlemanly debate.  I have been one who has for too long pondered where the red line is between action, sometimes violent action, and tolerating the intolerable, while hoping, against hope, that the country would finally realize where it is headed and turn around.  I have been presenting facts and figures to people who can only understand emotion; casting my pearls before swine.

Many former leftists have been warning us for years that the Left does not play by the rules, indeed does not recognize any rules.  David Horowitz is a prominent former member of the New Left who warned us early and often with such books as The Politics of Bad Faith. But having been brought up to believe that good overcomes evil, I could not bring myself to fight fire with fire. Mike Vanderboegh is another who has come to the light from darkness. I met Mike once or twice at various gun protests. Once in Northern Virginia, right across the river within sight of the Capitol, Washington DC, and once in Greensboro, NC. Even then I could not bring myself to do what Mike has done, sad to say. It seems I did not have the courage of my convictions.  It is cowardly to obey an unjust law, and it is cowardly to compromise with evil.  Or as Jesse Helms, Senator from North Carolina, famously said:

Compromise, hell! That's what has happened to us all down the line -- and that's the very cause of our woes. If freedom is right and tyranny is wrong, why should those who believe in freedom treat it as if it were a roll of bologna to be bartered a slice at a time?

Ever since Ted Cruz dropped out of the race, I have been doing a lot of soul searching.  Ted was my guy, the man for whom I had been looking for 40 years.  Ted is a walking, talking, Constitution of the United States of America, and honestly would be a true successor to Justice Antonin Scalia and no doubt welcomed by Justice Sam Alito and Justice Clarence Thomas.  The others I can not in all conscience dignify with the title of Justice.

I have vowed never to vote for the lesser of two evils again.  I have sworn not to put my name to it, nor to give such an abhorrence my blessing.  My personal integrity means too much to me.  High sounding phrases, no doubt, but now when I read these words what they scream to me is what an egotistical ass!  Because what these people have been trying to say is right.  Someone boxing under the Marquess of Queensberry rules can not defeat a mixed martial artist.  Any chair in a bar fight.  Don't bring a knife to a gun fight.   The Left does not play fair, and neither should we.  For a true gentleman is gentle with those who are gentle, but is ruthless to those who are ruthless.

Two articles today at the American Thinker have prompted me to finally write this confession for the entire world to see.  The first, entitled All I know is that gentlemanly conservatism is dead by Christopher Chatrill points out that government is forces, and someone, somewhere, will always be hurt by any action government takes. Which is why a it is so important to have a government fully limited in its scope and power. It is why a Bill of Rights that defines certain rights as off the table for discussion or voting is also so important. It is why we must be ever vigilant to see that the people entrusted with power do not abuse their power.  The founders were mortal men, to be sure, with all the flaws that entails, but they were nonetheless Divinely inspired. Like the Bible, and Shakespeare, what they wrote is timeless. You so called "liberals" who insist that the 200 years since its writing have changed everything, usually without reading it or contemplating its virtues, need to take your arrogant smart phone naval gazing, go sit down and shut the f@#& up. There, was that ungentlemanly enough for you?

The other, which also hit home is For Trump! Against the Disloyalist by Jared E. Peterson. Like most conservatives, I had not thought of myself as disloyal. I had thought of myself as an individual. After all, one name for the Left, which encompasses Communists, Socialists, Fascists, Progressives, Fabians, liberals, etc, etc, ad nauseum, is "collectivists." The opposite of "collectivist" is "individualists," right? Except in the real world these two archetypes don't really exists. Among collectivists there are ranges of opinion, and among individualists, no man is an island. Everyone who survives needs the cooperation of others.  More, if I truly believed that the Constitution was Divinely inspired, then truly I was putting my ego, my self will above that of my Creator.  Clearly, I was wrong.  For that, I am sorry.  Peterson is right, that a Hillary administration would be a disaster, if for no other reason than that they are killing innocent children right here in America through abortion.  No more.  Enough is enough.

I will vote for Trump.  Moreover, I will pledge to do whatever I can to seal his election.  But I will be watching.  I would have preferred a Washington, but I will take a Trump.

Obama explains why there is no reason to control guns. What?

summer patriot, winter soldier points out tha Obama inexplicably explains why there is no public safety concern in America justifying gun control.

in an article posted on july 22, 2016 at time's web magazine, authored by maya rhodan (@ m_rhodan), president barack obama was at some pains to explain why he is the most cynical gun grabber in the history of the republic. he also explained at length why there is absolutely no underlying public health and safety reason to justify "gun control," leaving the only possible basis for it a rather cynical attempt to disarm his political opponents.

he may not have intended to do just that, as he was attacking donald trump's "doom and gloom" assessment of the nation at the republican national convention and trying to point out how successful his administration has been, but, he did just that. he proved that there is no basis in fact nor in our recent history to justify interfering with our rights to possess and use firearms.

The use of all lower case is in the original. But despite writing in the style of e. e. cummings, his point is still made that by any critical examination what Obama actually said, there is no utilitarian reason to take away American's guns. On a principled basis, of course, there is no reason either, unless your principle is to establish a dictatorship. Is that the principle Obama doesn't want to say?

On voting for Trump

I was talking to another conservative last evening, and consoled her with the idea that Cruz is not finished, that we have not heard the last of him.  I likened Cruz to Winston Churchill, and noted that when Ted's time comes, the country will call him to great service.  Oddly enough, today I read that C. Edmund Wright had the same thoughts in an article entitled Time Will Vindicate Ted Cruz over at the American Thinker. wright starts off stating his thesis:

The fullness of time will vindicate Ted Cruz's actions at the National Convention this week, and as a bonus, the reaction has exposed that Donald Trump has indeed jumped in between the sheets with the Republican Establishment. On the second point, let's not quibble over who seduced whom.

He then spends several paragraphs comparing the conventional wisdom of the era to what actually happened, noting the the conventional wisdom got it mostly wrong, before making this point:

First, about this whole notion of political suicide: I thought what we were looking for was someone willing to put truth ahead of career expediency and the next election cycle. I obviously misjudged what some of you wanted.

Frankly, I was shocked at the way so many otherwise conservative people went all in for Trump. It seems that having someone on the national stage speaking what was on their minds was more important than having someone dependable to actually, you know, treat the Presidency of the Republic as it is meant to be treated by the Founders. Personally, what I found is that few people actually know the Constitution, or care about the Constitution. They just want to slap around the libs for a while. Few people seem to understand too that we are indeed a Republic, not a Democracy, and that many of the things Congress is engaged in are not Constitutional. The Court has long ago left off doing its Constitutional duty, and the Presidency...well, you get the idea.

On this pledge issue, I would like a few questions answered. First, didn't Trump threaten not only to break the pledge, but even to run third party multiple times? And didn't his legions adore him for it? He did, and they did.

Are there no circumstances under which the honorable thing to do is to break a pledge, a promise, or a contract? We all know there certainly are. And by the way, breaking contracts and promises is a large part of Trump's business career. Hell, it's the art of the deal, after all. Declaring bankruptcy four times is indeed the breaking of four significant pledges!

I won't even mention the multiple infidelities. That would be tacky.

And why do you supporters even want a Cruz endorsement? If he's Lyin Ted, he did Trump a favor. Dittos if he is this tool of Goldman Sachs. Is it even necessary to bother with the detail that Trump is considering a Goldman appointee as Treasury secretary?

Now, I do not control any of this, and I am not so naive as to believe my vote actually counts. I am not sure weather I will vote for Trump yet, or simply abstain. Once again I am forced into a choice between very bad and even worse, only this time I think it is a choice between one evil and another evil.

I may be wrong.  Certainly if Trump wins, I will hope that he turns out to be the man my friends think he is,  Heaven knows our Republic needs someone to clean out the rats nest of corruption that Washington has become.  Its just that I don't think Trump is the one to do it.

How Democrats Steal Elections

If you want to know how Democrats steal elections, you might take a look at Paul Murphy's How Democrats Steal Elections. It seems as if its a miracle if somebody honest wins an election.

The Spiritual Value and Meaning of Money

On Sunday, July 10, 2016, Fay Voshell had an article at the American Thinker entitled Brexit Reveals the Complete Bankruptcy of the European Union. While the article spends a lot of time talking about the spiritual bankruptcy of the EU, what it really is is a call to reawaken our Christian identities both in Europe and in America. Voshell:

We Americans should be grateful that Great Britain has recovered some of its memory as a nation and has indicated she does not wish her national identity to disappear down the memory hole. We can be glad she sees herself and her people in more than economic terms or as part of a faceless bureaucratic super state.

One can even hope that she and America as well may also recover the memory of her Christian past and put it to work in visualizing a Christian framework for the nation. That effort would be heroic, largely because the effort of recovery of memory and the actualization of a vision for the future is supremely heroic work.

Today’s concerned Christians find themselves in the situation of England’s Christian community during 1938, when their country was facing the prospect of totalitarian aggression and absorption into a secularist super state determined to rule all of Europe...

Between the misleading title, and the quote above, Voshell explains the the spiritual bankruptcy of the European Union and its insane regulatory regime. The EU has misplaced the notion of equality before the law, and equality before God, and turned it instead into equality of stuff.  But of course equal stuff just means less stuff for everyone.  For even though the capitalist notion of serving others by creating new things to satisfy the public's desires, serves those who create them, it nevertheless achieves God's goals precisely because it serves others.

While Bernie Sanders may rail at 23 different choices for under arm deodorant, those choices would not be available if people didn't think we needed them and chose to buy them.   Moreover, under arm deodorant choices aren't starving America's children. This is where Marxist theory that drives the EU, and increasingly the US breaks down. The Marxist looks at the total resources available to us as a sort of pie. If you get a bigger slice, somebody else must get a smaller slice. It seems very logical...except it doesn't work that way. When somebody brings something new to the market, the pie gets bigger. The more successful a product is, the bigger the pie gets. When somebody else brings another thing to the market, the pie gets bigger still. And along the way, as a byproduct of bringing things to market, people get jobs, pay taxes, and society is enriched.

I am typing on a devise that wasn't invented yet when I was 20. For those who don't remember, everything was done with paper, pencil and ink.  Even the electronic calculator had not been invented yet.  Calculations were accomplished by slide rules, or adding machines.  If you were working on the space program, you could have some of your work done on one of the room size computers using languages such as FORTRAN, with each programs step punched on Hollerith cards.  Information that we now take for granted was available only to the rich, or to those with access to a major library because the cost of having subscriptions to all the news papers, journals, etc. was very expensive. The thing that allowed the personal computer revolution, the internet, and a host of other technologies was something called Disk Operating System, or DOS.  DOS was a system languishing unused until Bill Gates recognized its value, bought it, and founded Microsoft.  Microsoft made Bill Gates billions of dollars, but it didn't make those billions by stealing them from others,  It made billions of dollars by creating something of value that wasn't there before, in essence increasing the size of the pie.  Henry Ford did the same thing a in developing the Ford Model T and the assembly line.  Indeed, all such inventions increase the size of the pie, and enrich not only the inventor, but the workers, the financiers, indeed, everybody.  Reagan's saying that a rising tide floats all boats was more true than he was given credit for.

So what about all this suits God's purposes?  God loves us.  God is also the creator of everything that is, and everything that is not.  In other words, everything ultimately belongs to God.  God gives us the things we need for survival, and expects us to give back out of our abundance.  The greater our abundance the greater our obligation to share.  To see the truth of these statements, all you need to do is look at the relative prosperity of the Western nations as opposed to the paucity of the staples of life in the old Soviet Union.  Russia had more physical resources than the United States, but wasn't able to turn them into useful products because of the economic and political system.  Or look today at the Sharia states, and see how poor they are and how wealth Israel is in the same region, with less resources.  Oh yes, the rulers have wealth, but the people do not.

Did I say that God loves us.  Yes, but God does not love us as for example he loves the animals.  We have a greater purpose than living to eat, and eating to live.  Our very souls demand a purpose greater than ourselves.  What is that purpose?  You can only find your individual purpose in prayer and meditation.  But you will find it somehow, in some way, as helping your fellow man.  Yes, it may enrich you as well, but your true purpose, your calling, will be helping others.  Sometimes, it may mean picking up a gun, as the Sons of Liberty International have done in Iraq to help defend the Chaldean Christians from annihilation at the hands of ISIS. Or it might be something as small as moving cars from place to place so that people can rent them and conduct their business efficiently. Often it is not What you do, as you Attitude about what you do.

I must also comment that what we are now seeing in the US is not true capitalism, as outlined by Adam Smith in the   Wealth of Nations, but rather an unholy alliance of rich financiers and government conspiring to keep innovation from coming to market. It would be as if the carriage makers got together with government to squash the automobile. This cronyism is the very opposite of capitalism, and more akin to the feudal system of the middle ages.

Back to Voshell:

It is 1938 in England, Europe and in America. Britain has made the giant step toward recovering her national identity and sovereignty. It remains to be seen if the Christians within her and her cousin America will take the next step and heed Mr. Oldham’s clarion call.

Will our nations once again seek to make the Christian understanding of the meaning and end of man’s existence ascendant in national life?

With God’s help, we can.

Indeed

The BLM has chosen Thug Culture

Leon H Wolf has a post over at RedState that places cold blanket over statements you read that our police are generally doing a professional job.  While I believe these statements to be true, I can not discount that the black community has evidence that the police have treated them unfairly not only in the past but in the present as well.  At the same time the so called "gentle giant" was not such a case, nor was Freddy Gray.  When you break the law, you take risks that can mean you may be killed.  But you can read Wolf's essay at The Uncomfortable Reason Why It Came to This in Dallas Yesterday.  Yet, there is also this: Because I was Black?  I have had experiences like Rusty Walkers that cause me to discount some of the stories people tell. The myth of "white privilege" also does not match up well with my own experience.  My own experience is that corruption, and just plain bad luck haunt everyone, indeed, that they are the common human condition.

While I can agree with Wolf on the reasons why it happened, I can not condone the actions taken.  Is it right that because Hillary got off for crimes she obviously committed, and others went to jail for less,  that now I can go about killing just any politician I can find?  No? Or what about the murder of Nicole Simpson by OJ.  A jury found him innocent even though he was manifestly guilty as sin.  Can I now go around killing blacks at will?  No?  By this reasoning of course I can.  But this reasoning is flawed.

As anyone who has read Radley Balko's body of work knows, police corruption, police over militarization, and police mismanagement affect both blacks and whites.  As anyone who watched FBI Director Comey knows, corruption occurs even among the untouchables.  As anyone who has followed the War on Guns knows, the ATF has bad guys among its ranks.  But what we also know is that these bad guys are not the majority of the police or of Federal agents.  Most police do indeed act professionally most of the time.  Most take a great deal of abuse from the public, and I applaud them for doing the job anyway.

At the same time, the police, at whatever level are expected to demonstrate an example that is a notch above what the average person demonstrates. This should be understood when they put on the badge, and they should be reminded periodically.  Police, like the ordinary citizen should be seen as obeying the traffic laws and other laws even more meticulously than the ordinary citizen.  What our police departments need is to be more ruthless about disciplining those who do wrong, and making such discipline more public.  It is perhaps harsh, but when the police do actually do something wrong, they should be very publicly punished.  When a police officer kills someone without justification, they should be made an example.  I also believe that more departments should be outfitting their officers with collar cameras.  While these will not resolve every case, they probably make both the officers and the public better behaved.

In choosing to highlight cases like Michael Brown and Freddy Gray, the Black Lives Matter movement has chosen thug culture as the authentic black culture.  But the average person, black or white, will never accept it.  The success of the the Civil Rights movement can be attributed to the fact that they chose the high ground, and advocated non-violence.  While the media and certain racial hustlers don't want to admit it, race relations have indeed improved since the 1950s.  Whites are not the enemy, and really never were.  Rather than start a race war, a war that BLM can not win, we all need to stand together against corruption in our police departments, and in our politicians.  All lives matter.

The Pulse of Gun Control

David Codrea has his latest Gun Rights column in Guns Magazine up over at the War on Guns. Go read it. And check into the War on Guns regularly. David has his finger on the pulse of the gun rights community.