Courage Campaign Crossed the Line

So I receive emails from the Courage Campaign which fights for equal rights for minorities.

Today I got an email from them about Obama and how terrible it is that he is proposing more cuts to the budget than what was already agreed and that he "already gave the republicans what they wanted" so he should be focusing on creating jobs instead of cutting spending.

I replied to the email and here is what I wrote:

you better stick to full equality issues... providing jobs is NOT the government's purpose

this isn't about "giving republicans what they wanted", this is about a serious and grave challenge to our entire country. 

don't you understand? even with a balanced budget  (which 1.5 trillion doesn't do) we won't be rid of the national debt, because to get rid of it we need to have a NET GAIN every year... for many, many years.   

in order to have a net gain we would have to cut so many programs and eliminate so many tax shelters for the mega-rich that practically everyone in the country would be angry at the government. 

it would require an American toughness at least the magnitude that was suffered during the world wars.  to do it willingly before we are forced to, now THAT requires courage.

people naturally get more conservative during tough times.  if Americans suffer because we've reached the end of the rope, instead of voluntarily taking responsible action, then we will lose a lot of ground in the fight for personal freedoms.  but if we convince people to willingly sacrifice their favorite programs by eliminating or greatly reducing them, or by paying more taxes (those of us with money to speak of) then we can have economic recovery without the rash changes in attitude.

that's what the courage campaign should be advocating... hey all, let's put our war face on and figure out how to get by without social security, without welfare, without tax shelters, without pork barrel projects, without paying for senators traveling internationally, and without literally a million other things that sound great on paper but that all together are bringing our country to its knees. 

The Police Shot A Man In San Francisco

The story I read about this said that the man was hanging around in the subway, drunk, who threw his liquor bottle at the cops who were called to reign him in and then pulled a knife to attack the cops.  They shot him, and he died.

If that's the way it happened, it's unfortunate that he died but it's not the cop's fault that he chose to get drunk in a public place and chose to assault the cops. It could have ended differently for him had he made different choices.

Why are did people riot against the police? And why did they choose to do it in the subway where they interfere with the travel of people who had nothing to do with it?  That certainly wouldn't win my support if my travel plans were interrupted because some people are angry.

If the public judges that the police are being too aggressive perhaps it would be better to stage a demonstration in front of the police station or town hall, or talk to their city council.

Destabilizing the Security Situation

I get annoyed when I read news like "the bomb may have been intended to destabilize the security situation". If one bomb can do that, it must have already been unstable.

The detonation of a bomb, the assassination of a leader, the murder of innocent people, these are not things that reflect the security situation. It is the way the government responds to them that reflects the security situation. If the government has the means to bring the criminals to justice, there is potential for security... If the government pursues the criminals and brings them to justice, then it is working. There is nothing unstable about that. If the government, because of corruption or lack of means, is not able to pursue the criminals, then the more people know this and take advantage, the worse the security situation becomes.

Ultimately, the security situation is each citizen's perception about their ability to live in peace, about the government's ability to deal justice. The security situation is the deterrent to crime and the actual capacity for enforcement.

Some people's perceptions may be swayed by one attack but the actual capacity for enforcement cannot be significantly degraded by just one attack. Therefore the security situation cannot be destabilized by just one attack. That's why I get really annoyed when I see someone writing such drivel - because the writer is typically speculating about the attacker's motive, and I think in most cases writers give attackers too much credit. Most of the attackers, whether it's in the USA or in one of our "war" zones, are just unstable paranoid delusional misguided immoral self-righteous fearful violent scum. They try to justify their crimes in any way they can and writers just do them a favor by publishing their bullshit.

I would prefer for the serious news publishers to abstain from propagating analysis until after the facts are actually available, because often people read the first version of the story and then aren't interested in the updates... not to mention that most of the time the updates don't get the same level of placement as the original story, as if they are less important.

And now, in mocking fashion, I present you other news: An ignorant blog writer attacked a common news publishing practice today, in a possible attempt to destabilize the already deteriorating journalism situation...

Crying for America: In The Valley of the Shadow of Debt

So Congress finally passed a budget bill... but it's terrible.

First, they raised the debt ceiling, which is practically a guarantee that our national debt will increase by the allowable amount.

Second, they committed to spending cuts but didn't specify what they will be. They are just pushing the tough decisions to someone else... or until after they get re-elected. That's cowardly. Any proposal for cuts is sure to be met with strong opposition... either by the other party who hates the proposal or by the leader's own party who hates the sacrifice. They got elected to be leaders not to campaign for their next election. I don't care if they get re-elected, I just want the country's problems solved!

Third, they require a vote next year on measures to cut the budget... but they can just vote against the cuts and still meet the requirement!

Fourth, they only require 2.4 trillion in deficit reduction over the next 10 years... but we have almost 15 trillion dollars of debt. So that's not nearly fast enough. We need to cut spending NOW to levels that will reduce our deficit by about 1 trillion a year... so that we have a hope of getting out of this mess in 15-20 years and not saddle our children with this problem.  By the way, this means that we can't just balance the budget... we have to tilt it in the other direction.

Neither Democrats nor Republicans have what it takes to solve the nation's economic trouble. Only Libertarians have what it takes to cut the government's spending to sustainable levels.

Family Responsibilities

I just read an article on CNN that featured senior citizens complaining about what will happen if they stop receiving social security payments from the government.

Not every one is in the same situation so instead of generalizing, I'm going to comment on just one of the seniors who was interviewed:


"For some, a loss of Social Security income could mean a loss of independence.
Charles Tanner moved to an apartment near his daughter's home in Lexington, Ohio, after his wife died. It's important to the 81-year-old former welder to live on his own
But if he stops receiving his $1,400 Social Security check, he doesn't know how he'll be able to pay the rent in coming months. That means he'd have to move in with his daughter.
"It would be a sorry day if it happens," said Tanner."

Wel I disagree with Mr. Tanner. Maybe it would be a sorry day for him because he has a big ego and thinks that he should be able to take care of himself until his bitter end, but he's really just deluding himself. He's too old to work, and he depends on the government to pay his bills. Is that manly? He's an institutionalized freeloader. Does that show tough character?

Moving in with remaining family is EXACTLY what all seniors need to do when they cannot take care of themselves anymore. Their family is the first group with responsibility to take care of them.

I'm outraged that Mr. Tanner prefers to pay his bills with my tax money than to accept his daughter's help, and I'm outraged that we have a system that even gives him that choice.  I DON'T CONSENT TO PAYING MR. TANNER'S BILLS!!! Every day is a sorry day when the wealth of millions of Americans is redistributed to millions of others without consent.

I love my parents and I vow to take care of them when they are too old to do it themselves. When are they too old?  Well, in my case they are hard-working and responsible and they took care of me and my siblings so I'm going to let them decide when they are too old. When they decide they don't want to work anymore, they can move in with me, and use their savings to do fun things for themselves (and the grandchildren...) instead of pay bills.

At least Mr. Tanner HAS a daughter who can take care of him.  Not every senior citizen has remaining family, and that's sad.

I'm generally opposed to the government supporting poor people, old people, sick people, disabled people, mentally incompetent people, morally incompetent people (criminals)... I think that's a job for families, friends, and charities. And I'm generally opposed to the government supporting rich people. So really I'm generally opposed to the government supporting any subset of people because that's unfair to the people who are not in that subset. The government should be equally unsupportive of everyone so that it can expend it's resources effectively to uphold and enforce everyone's right to life, liberty, justice, own property, and equal opportunity. In order for this foundational charter of government to be executed well, we need to put aside special and discriminatory interests.

I do think about the consequences. If the government stops taking care of all these people, and their families and friends don't take care of them, and there aren't enough charities to take care of them, what will they do?  Roam the streets until killed by accident, starvation, or sickness?  Maybe. Or maybe we can provide easy work for seniors to give them choice. It can be clerical, supervisory, counseling, coaching, telling stories, anything that doesn't require hard labor or too many hours in a single day. Then anyone who has failed to develop a family or group of friends who will take care of them can still survive by doing light work. And everyone who chooses not to - well, we need to just let the consequences play out.  If individual people feel sorry for them then it is individuals who need to reach out and help. Cities and towns are not just collections of individuals - they are societies. So whenever we have the power to help each other, we should do it, because our time to need help is just around the corner.

I don't buy into the notion that ALL old people have benefited society so much that it's our duty to support them in old age. I say that most old people worked jobs and got compensated for the work they did. Maybe some of them volunteered in charities to help the needy. That's awesome, and I hope that younger people will do the same. But I don't owe them anything. If a senior person wants to retire but hasn't any family at all, hopefully that person has been a blessing to other people enough that they feel they should help to take care of him or her in old age. If not, well... insert your favorite adage about consequences here.

Some people have this notion that people shouldn't have to work until the day they die. Well, it's something that we wish for but it can't come true for everybody. Maybe we just have to accept the fact that not everyone is going to lead an ideal life. We have to accept personal tragedies and we have to develop a stomach for the real, and use that as a motivation to work to prevent ourselves from suffering the same misfortune as others, instead of rallying to unfair wealth-distribution schemes.

That $1400 that Mr. Tanner gets every month actually represents an even bigger loss to the rest of us, because there are overhead costs to administering such government programs and a lot of waste involved.  Yet if Mr. Tanner moved in with his daughter, she would be able to use her money to take care of him much more efficiently... the entirety of every dollar spent from her budget would be a dollar that benefits him.

I do think that we have a responsibility to take care of the elderly. But when I say that, I mean that each of us has responsibility to take care of our own elderly - our own family or acquaintances. Not of everyone else's elderly. And should any person refuse to take care of his own parents when they are too weak to work, that person cannot just dump the responsibility on the rest of us. That person must accept the consequences and the loss of the parent. And it's guaranteed to happen at some point ANYWAY.

I'm going to take care of my parents when they need it. I'll provide a place to sleep, food to eat, medicines, as much as I can afford. But the human body grows weaker in old age and the number of problems and complications just grows and grows. Even if I had all the money in the world there's a point after which I simply will not be able to keep my parents alive.  Dying is natural, and I hope that I will make my parents proud and happy before it's their time to go. But I will never expect anyone else (other than my siblings) to pitch to take care of them, because they are MY parents, and they are part of MY family responsibility. It would be unfair to burden anyone else with taking care of my stuff.

And if I am blessed to reach old age, I hope that through my actions between now and then my children and my community grow to love me and will want to take care of me when I cannot do it by myself anymore.

Well, that's why I'm so angry at people who let the government pay their bills. They are stealing from me.  I have the right to liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and every dollar I pay in taxes that gets redistributed as welfare to some other person is a violation of my constitutional rights because the government is taking it from me by force - well, by threatening all the penalties for not paying taxes. It's wrong and perverse for the government, which exists to protect my rights, to violate them.

All I Want for Christmas... Is A 40% Smaller Federal Budget

I feel like a lot of my tax money is spent on programs that will never benefit me or my children, in any way at all.

Federal programs are supposed to benefit the entire country, not specific groups or places or businesses.

So I support spending on national infrastructure, transportation, communications, defense of our borders (not around the world), dominance in space, education (improving the quality and number of teachers, not adding more testing or bureaucracy), and regulation of harmful substances that businesses try to sneak into their products for costs savings or whatever without regard for the health and safety of their own customers.

I oppose spending on welfare, social security, any benefits at all for illegal immigrants, forced insurance, and most other services that should be provided by families, friends, and charities.

But most of all, I oppose spending that exceeds our national income, and I abhor the idea of ANYONE - rich, middle class, or poor - paying more taxes simply because lawmakers can't JUST SAY NO to the next "good idea",  so worried that people won't vote for them or pay their re-election campaign expenses if they don't support certain programs.

Being in Congress is more than just representing the loudest mouths in your district. It's about dedicating your time to studying the issues and making decisions that are best for our state and our nation, and sometimes that means saying "NO" to spending proposals that just don't belong in the federal budget.

Just as millions of households, including mine, had to cut their expenses the last few years in order to survive the recession without racking up junk debt,  so does the federal government need to cut a lot of expenses in order to get in shape.

Neither I nor millions of my fellow Americans had the luxury of simply voting for an increase in our household incomes, and so the federal government should not toy with the idea of simply taxing the problem away.

Our federal budget needs extreme cuts and this year, all I want for Christmas is a federal budget that's 40% to 50% smaller than what it was last year.

Any lawmaker who shows character by voting to cut non-essential programs from the federal budget, and to reduce the size of other programs that are too bloated and inefficient, as unpopular as this may be, is welcome to eat at my dinner table and sleep on my couch... even if I'm an advocate of some of the programs that are cut.

On Solving Our Problems

We have a big society with big problems.

But they are not too big -- our problems are not bigger than us. We can solve them.

Some problems we need to solve mainly through technological advances, others we need to solve through critical thinking and bold action, yet others through wise sacrifice.

Clearly, regardless of what anyone believes about global warming, the pollution caused by the sheer amount of waste we produce cannot be disputed. The damage to animal habitats directly resulting from our activities has been well documented. To stop everything we're doing in the name of saving the planet is just not realistic -- it will be too hard to convince everyone that it's worth it. We need technological advances to make it feasible to switch to Earth-friendly energy sources and to dispose of our waste better and to obviate the need to destroy more animal habitats to obtain natural resources. So we need to collectively invest more in the needed research and development.

Our national budget - and many state budgets - are not sustainable. There is nothing complicated about this. If we continue to spend more than we earn on such a colossal scale, our money will become worthless and this will cause many other problems. We only have to look at other countries around the world that cannot control their economies to see what might happen to us. This is not a complex financial or technical problem. This is a problem of will power.  Spending more than we earn means we want more than what we can have, and that means there will always be someone to oppose any proposed cut from the budget. So we need critical thinking to figure out what we ought to spend our money on - what is really necessary for the common good, in stark contrast to what we've long fooled ourselves is necessary but is really only for the benefit of specific groups. We need critical thinking and a keen eye to cut through the bullshit.  And then we need will power to overcome selfish objections from all the groups who lose their benefits. People really get up in arms when they are about to lose something they already have and enjoy or depend upon. But that's how we got into this mess - the accumulation of choices that favor short-sighted or selfish benefits over the national responsibility.

Some of our problems come from our shallow need to appear charitable, to take care of everyone. People who choose to smoke and get cancer from it are unfortunate, but they made a choice and the cost of their healthcare should be borne by themselves, possibly their family, and any insurance they purchased for that purpose. It must not be subsidized by any level of government. People who choose to use other drugs and develop problems from that are also unfortunate, but they also made a choice, and no level of government should subsidize their treatment either.  Let the true charitable people show themselves and show compassion to these victims of poor choices and help them with money and resources pooled together specifically for that purpose. Sending money and food to help starving people in other countries when we still haven't completely solved that problem here doesn't make any sense.  Sending help to a country that suffered a great natural disaster is a noble thing to do, but it's very different from prolonged, sustained aid for a chronic condition.

Those of us who are in the business of graphically violent entertainment - movies and video games - need to practice restraint and avoid selling those products to children. This doesn't relieve parents of their responsibility but is a kind of voluntary social cooperation because the graphic violence has been proven to have certain negative effects on impressionable children (and some adults too) who haven't yet a solid moral grounding. And it's not the fault of the video games or the movies - the effect can also happen from watching graphic violence on the news. News of terrorist attacks and suicides have been proven to spur certain kinds of people to also make threats and attacks and inflict harm on themselves because something hidden in their psyche has identified with the attacker or the victim and unconsciously compelled them to do something similar.

To prohibit the creation and sale of entertainment to everyone because some people can't handle it would not be the right path either. No, we must accept some risk with our liberty so we do not become a totalitarian society. But a little wise sacrifice for the sake of society should be encouraged by all in order to reduce that risk of damage.

Our news publishers should sacrifice some of whatever it is that causes them to behave so outrageously sometimes. Not every story is a national emergency. Not every story needs up-to-the-minute or live coverage. We don't need to know "ok the judge has sat down" and we don't need to see the police crouching outside a hostage-taker's window as it happens. A complete, accurate, and detailed coverage of the story after it happens is enough in most cases. In the absence of a very important story, less-important stories should not be hyped, but rather presented with a relief that there is nothing terrible going on at the moment. During the seconds between entertainment, instead of wasting them with a vague "hook" to get people to watch the "full story" later which turns out to be the same few facts repeated with endless variation, wouldn't it be great if the news producers would choose to provide a few seconds of actual information instead?  The sacrifice here is that they may have less viewers. Or maybe what is really needed is for someone to start a news station for busy productive people that has no bullshit - and charge fairly for not wasting people's time and not scaring people into depression thinking how there is never a pause from bad news.