Liberty for all Patriots!

You Voted Democrat???? Pick Your Reason!!!!

2010-04-20T17:14:00.000-07:00

Pick Your Reason

When your friends can't explain why they voted for Democrats, give them this list. They can then pick a reason

10. I voted Democrat because I believe oil companies' profits of 4% on a gallon of gas are obscene but the government taxing the same gallon of gas at 15% isn't.

9. I voted Democrat because I believe the government will do a better job of spending the money I earn than I would.

8. I voted Democrat because Freedom of speech is fine as long as nobody is offended by it.

7. I voted Democrat because I'm way too irresponsible to own a gun, and I know that my local police are all I need to protect me from murderers and thieves.

6. I voted Democrat because I believe that people who can't tell us if it will rain on Friday can tell us that the polar ice caps will melt away in ten years if I don't start driving a Prius.

5. I voted Democrat because I'm not concerned about the slaughter of millions of babies through abortion so long as we keep all death row inmates alive.

4. I voted Democrat because I think illegal aliens have a right to free health care, education, and Social Security benefits.

3. I voted Democrat because I believe that business should not be allowed to make profits for themselves. They need to break even and give the rest away to the government for redistribution as the democrats see fit.

2. I voted Democrat because I believe liberal judges need to rewrite the Constitution every few days to suit some fringe kooks who would never get their agendas past the voters.

1. I voted Democrat because my head is so firmly planted up my ass it's unlikely that I'll ever have another point of view.

Great Boss explaining Obama's New Economy!!!

2010-04-19T16:59:00.000-07:00

A Lay-off letter from an excellent boss!

Dear Employees:

As the CEO of this organization, I have resigned myself to the fact that Barrack Obama is our President and that our taxes and government fees will increase in a BIG way.

To compensate for these increases, our prices would have to increase by about 10%. But since we cannot increase our prices right now due to the dismal state of the economy, we will have to lay off sixty of our employees instead.

This has really been bothering me since I believe we are family here and I didn't know how to choose who would have to go.

So, this is what I did. I walked through our parking lot and found sixty 'Obama' bumper stickers on our employees' cars and have decided these folks will be the ones to let go. I can't think of a more fair way to approach this problem.. They voted for change...... I gave it to them.

I will see the rest of you at the annual company picnic..

THE BOSS

Turning the tide - One Vote at a Time! (visit us on Facebook!)

2010-03-31T06:05:00.000-07:00

I truly love this country - there, I said it! And isn't it amazing how indoctrinated we have become by the "main-stream media" that to say this demonstrates that we're racist, or sexist, or homophobic, or we resort to violence, or that we are dangerous? But we never get the opportunity to say our side of the story, or the fringe element (and there is a fringe in every group) is somehow determined to be the representative of what we believe, feel, or act. I watched demonstrations from the right and left in the past couple days, and it is night and day on how the groups handle themselves, and how the media handle the coverage - it's a shame, but that doesn't mean you don't keep trying, and I believe that's happening, through social networking like facebook, through virtual marches, through blogs, and through our voices, as the main media outlets have continued to prevent all sides from speaking. Recently, there have been a spate of protests at Conservative speaker presentations, and instead of the uproar, that we receive when someone criticizes someone from the left (such as President Obama - with "you lie" - which actually was the truth, as the bill was changed in the next week, but none of us heard that from the media) - as protesters don't have a right to speak, these protestors against Coulter and Rove, et. al., were cheered on by the media. But we're seeing some "change," as we talk, and listen to those who supported Obama and his plans, privately- away from cameras, are having doubts about this process. With the passage of Obamacare, in our workplaces there were no cheering as there was for his election, with some even saying, they didn't want to talk about it. Maybe we're seeing the first signs, of change we can all believe in. And it starts in November 2010, and the end of this nightmare in 2012!

The Country is Coming Together (We all hate Obama)

2010-02-21T10:27:00.000-08:00

Thank you, Chosen One, for bringing the country together. As of the latest polls, a majority of the country will not vote for you again. And yet, you believe you know better than us, pushing legislation that none of us want, such as Cap and Trade, the faux "Jobs Bill," and of course, Obama-Care. People, it's time to stand and take down this tyrant - November 2010 can't come fast enough. With that, and a people's referendum for impeachment would be a nice start. NJ, Virginia, and Mass elections showed what can happen when people stand up, remove their shackles and lead. At the latest CPAC convention, lots of excitement, and Obama and his cronies awoke the sleeping giant, and it's ticked. Good speeches by everyone, but the two best were Glen Beck's and Ron Paul's - click the link for Paul's new video featuring the anthem for our revolution. Now, let's take back what's ours!!!!

Who is Obama???

2010-02-11T09:24:00.000-08:00

*_Article from Alan Caruba from Wall Street Journal_*

"I have this theory about Barack Obama. I think he's led a kind of
make-believe life in which money was provided and doors were opened
because at some point early on somebody or some group took a look at
this tall, good looking, half-white, half-black, young man with an
exotic African/Muslim name and concluded he could be guided toward a
life in politics where his facile speaking skills could even put him in
the White House.

In a very real way, he has been a young man in a very big hurry. Who
else do you know has written two memoirs before the age of 45? "Dreams
of My Father" was published in 1995 when he was only 34 years old. The
"Audacity of Hope" followed in 2006. If indeed, he did write them
himself. There are some who think that his mentor and friend, Bill
Ayers, a man who calls himself a "communist with a small 'c'" was the
real author.

His political skills consisted of rarely voting on anything that might
be deemed controversial. He went from a legislator in the Illinois
legislature to the Senator from that state because he had the good
fortune of having Mayor Daley's formidable political machine at his
disposal.

He was in the U.S. Senate so briefly that his bid for the presidency
was either an act of astonishing self-confidence or part of some greater
game plan that had been determined before he first stepped foot in the
Capital. How, many must wonder, was he selected to be a 2004 keynote
speaker at the Democrat convention that nominated John Kerry when
virtually no one had ever even heard of him before?

He outmaneuvered Hillary Clinton in primaries. He took Iowa by storm. A
charming young man, an anomaly in the state with a very small black
population, he oozed "cool" in a place where agriculture was the
antithesis of cool. He dazzled the locals. And he had an army of
volunteers drawn to a charisma that hid any real substance.

And then he had the great good fortune of having the Republicans select
one of the most inept candidates for the presidency since Bob Dole. And
then John McCain did something crazy. He picked Sarah Palin, an unknown
female governor from the very distant state of Alaska . It was a ticket
that was reminiscent of 1984's Walter Mondale and Geraldine Ferraro and
they went down to defeat.

The mainstream political media fell in love with him. It was a
schoolgirl crush with febrile commentators like Chris Mathews swooning
then and now over the man. The venom directed against McCain and, in
particular, Palin, was extraordinary.

Now, nearly a full year into his first term, all of those gilded years
leading up to the White House have left him unprepared to be President.
Left to his own instincts, he has a talent for saying the wrong thing at
the wrong time. It swiftly became a joke that he could not deliver even
the briefest of statements without the ever-present Tele-Prompters.

Far worse, however, is his capacity to want to "wish away" some
terrible realities, not the least of which is the Islamist intention to
destroy America and enslave the West. Any student of history knows how
swiftly Islam initially spread. It knocked on the doors of Europe ,
having gained a foothold in Spain .

The great crowds that greeted him at home or on his campaign "world
tour" were no substitute for having even the slightest grasp of history
and the reality of a world filled with really bad people with really bad
intentions..

Oddly and perhaps even inevitably, his political experience, a
cakewalk, has positioned him to destroy the Democrat Party's hold on
power in Congress because in the end it was never about the Party. It
was always about his communist ideology, learned at an early age from
family, mentors, college professors, and extreme leftist friends and
colleagues.

Obama is a man who could deliver a snap judgment about a Boston police
officer who arrested an "obstreperous" Harvard professor-friend, but
would warn Americans against "jumping to conclusions" about a mass
murderer at Fort Hood who shouted "Allahu Akbar." The absurdity of that
was lost on no one. He has since compounded this by calling the
Christmas bomber "an isolated extremist" only to have to admit a day or
two later that he was part of an al Qaeda plot.

He is a man who could strive to close down our detention facility at
Guantanamo even though those released were known to have returned to the
battlefield against America . He could even instruct his Attorney
General to afford the perpetrator of 9/11 a civil trial when no one else
would ever even consider such an obscenity. And he is a man who could
wait three days before having anything to say about the perpetrator of
yet another terrorist attack on Americans and then have to elaborate on
his remarks the following day because his first statement was so lame.

The pattern repeats itself. He either blames any problem on the Bush
administration or he naively seeks to wish away the truth.

Knock, knock. Anyone home? Anyone there? Barack Obama exists only as
the sock puppet of his handlers, of the people who have maneuvered and
manufactured this pathetic individual's life.

When anyone else would quickly and easily produce a birth certificate,
this man has spent over a million dollars to deny access to his.. Most
other documents, the paper trail we all leave in our wake, have been
sequestered from review. He has lived a make-believe life whose true
facts remain hidden.

We laugh at the ventriloquist's dummy, but what do you do when the
dummy is President of the United States of America?

Anti-Tea Party Laundering System by the Democrats

2010-02-10T08:52:00.000-08:00

(From their site, obviously they're getting their hopes up)

From our good friends at Fox News - amazing what democratic activists will stoop to, but if we did this, it would be a front page story:

Joseph Abrams
- FOXNews.com
- February 10, 2010
Anti-Tea Party Web Site Part of Scheme to Funnel Funds

A new Web site targeting the tea parties is a part of a complex network of money flowing from the mountainous coffers of the country's biggest labor unions and trickling slowly into political slush funds for Democratic activists.

A seemingly grassroots organization that's mounted an online campaign to counter the tea party movement is actually the front end of an elaborate scheme that funnels funds -- including sizable labor union contributions -- through the offices of a prominent Democratic party lawyer.

A Web site popped up in January dedicated to preventing the tea party's "radical" and "dangerous" ideas from "gaining legislative traction," targeting GOP candidates in Illinois for the firing squad.

"This movement is a fad," proclaims TheTeaPartyIsOver.org, which was established by the American Public Policy Center (APPC), a D.C.-based campaign shop that few people have ever heard of.

But a close look reveals the APPC's place in a complex network of money flowing from the mountainous coffers of the country's biggest labor unions into political slush funds for Democratic activists.

Here's how it works: What appears like a local groundswell is in fact the creation of two men -- Craig Varoga and George Rakis, Democratic Party strategists who have set up a number of so-called 527 groups, the non-profit election organizations that hammer on contentious issues (think Swift Boats, for example).

Varoga and Rakis keep a central mailing address in Washington, pulling in soft money contributions from unions and other well-padded sources to engage in what amounts to a legal laundering system. The money -- tens of millions of dollars -- gets circulated around to different states by the 527s, which pay for TV ads, Internet campaigns and lobbyist salaries, all while keeping the hands of the unions clean -- for the most part.

The system helps hide the true sources of funding, giving the appearance of locally bred opposition in states from Oklahoma to New Jersey, or in the case of the Tea Party Web site, in Illinois.

And this whitewash is entirely legal, say election law experts, who told FoxNews.com that this arrangement more or less the norm in Washington.

"It's not illegal but it is, I think, dishonest on the part of the organizations," said Paul Ryan, a legal counsel at the Campaign Legal Center. "And there's a reason they do it: they know voters don't like outsiders coming in to sway the vote."

Calls and e-mails to the Maryland-based consultant firm Independent Strategies, run by Varoga and Rakis, were not returned.

Outside of that firm, the center of their activity appears to be a single office in Southeast D.C. -- 300 M Street, Suite 1102 -- which plays host to a sprawling political shell game they have established.

Public records show at least seven political shops listed in Suite 1102, most of which are essentially clones of one another, but all of which have offered money -- from measly thousands to game-changing millions -- in state-level elections across the country:

-The American Public Policy Committee Donations | IRS forms
-Patriot Majority Donations | IRS forms
-Citizens for Progress Donations | IRS forms
-Oklahoma Freedom Fund Donations | IRS forms
-Mid Atlantic Leadership Fund Donations | IRS forms
-Public Security Now Donations | IRS forms
-Pioneer Majority Donations | IRS forms
-Bluegrass Freedom Fund Donations | IRS forms

The APPC, which developed the anti-tea party ads, has gotten all of its money for 2010 from Patriot Majority and from Citizens for Progress, which is also called Patriot Majority West.

Patriot Majority West sent them $25,000 in January, and Patriot Majority added another $5,000. The groups, both run by Varoga and Rakis, also swap hundreds of thousands of dollars between themselves, money often buttressed by gifts from Patriot Majority Midwest, seen above as the Oklahoma Freedom Fund.

The confusing naming system is intentional, say election law experts, who generally disapprove of the practice.

"I do take issue with and have long complained about groups that shield particular special interests with innocuous-sounding names like ... 'Americans for America,'" said Ryan. "That type of naming of an organization, I believe, is specifically intended to obscure the true sources of funding of special interest groups behind political activity."

These three Patriot Majority groups also send checks to Independent Strategies, the strategy firm run by Varoga and Rakis. And some of the 527s have sent money to VR Strategies, another firm run in part by and named after Varoga.

The most recent backers of the Patriot Majority and Patriot Majority West, which helped fund the APPC and thus the Tea Party site, form a veritable Who's Who of the country's top labor unions: the Service Employees International Union, Change to Win, the Communications Workers of America, the National Education Association, the Teamsters Union, the United Food & Commercial Workers Union and others besides.

But by far the largest donations have come from a collection of unionized government workers, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) -- which in 2008 alone donated $5.8 million to Patriot Majority and another $4.1 million to Patriot Majority Midwest.

Using this arrangement, Varoga and Rakis are managing what NPR called a "never-ending pot of union money" that they dispense among the 527s they run, which in turn pay for ads in hotly contested election districts.

That means that taxpayer dollars, sent up as union dues, have been going to fund a host of Democratic causes and help quash the tea party movement.

What's more, Varoga and Rakis are not actually present in Suite 1102. That is the office of their lawyer, Joseph Sandler, a longtime general counsel to the Democratic National Committee.

Sandler, whose firm and trust account raked in over $500,000 in Democratic party money in 2009 alone, told Fox News that there was nothing irregular in their setup.

"That's common practice," said Sandler, a renowned expert on election law who served as general counsel to the Democratic National Committee until February 2009, and whose firm, Sandler Reiff & Young, continues to work for both the Democratic party and numerous left-wing 527 groups.

Sandler noted that political committees and groups are often run by multiple people and don't have a central office, but need a place where they can be in ongoing contact with the IRS and other federal agencies that track election funds.

"It's very common for a law firm to give their address ... as the official address for the organization where correspondence can be received," he said.

It has the effect of confusing the ultimate sources of election funding, but also serves an important practical end, say election law experts.

"As a practical matter there's not a huge universe of lawyers in the United States that know political law all that well and most of them are here in D.C., said Ryan, of the Campaign Legal Center. "It's not uncommon for political organizations to be using lawyers in D.C. or starters, even if they're all over the country."

It is not clear whether TheTeaPartyIsOver.org is the start of a larger campaign run by Varoga and Rakis to target tea party activists. Additional attempts to reach Varoga at a California number were unsuccessful. A staffer answering the phone in Varoga's Oakland office last week told FoxNews.com that he was unavailable for comment and hung up.

Big Government's Cronies

2010-02-04T09:19:00.000-08:00

Thanks to John Stossel for fighting the good fight - if you get a chance, I recommend highly viewing the Stossel program on Fox Business channel Thursday nights - we need more government watchdogs, like Stossel, and then we need to get involved ourselves - we took our eyes off the process, and the kool-aid drinkers took over - look what you have today, case closed - so vote, or shut up!!!

Big Government's Cronies

There's an Ass for That (You knew there had to be an App!)

2010-02-03T07:49:00.000-08:00

State of Disunion

2010-01-29T05:31:00.000-08:00

Libertarians respond to State of the Union addressWASHINGTON - Libertarian Party (LP) Chairman William Redpath issued the following statement today in response to President Barack Obama's State of the Union address:"Tonight's speech was a reminder that, for decades, the policies of Republicans and Democrats alike have failed. Libertarians are asking people to take matters into their own hands. Instead of just complaining, we're encouraging ordinary Americans to step up and run for Congress on the Libertarian Party ballot line."I can say exactly the same thing about President Obama's speech tonight that I said about George W. Bush's State of the Union speech in January 2008: 'Tonight's State of the Union address went much as expected. Instead of calling for a more limited role of the federal government in American society, the President laid out plans that would only increase the government's intervention into the realm of economics, health care, education and foreign policy.'"I am weary of the President's unspoken premise that only government--indeed, only the federal government--can accomplish good in our society."President Obama seems to be totally blind to the concept that government can cause problems rather than solve them. His speech was filled with 'More': more handouts, more spending, more programs, more bailouts, more regulations. We Libertarians want less government, not more."Not to be outmatched by the Democrats, the Republican Party conveyed its lack of seriousness in addressing this nation's government spending problems by having Bob McDonnell, Virginia Governor for eleven (11) days, deliver its rebuttal to the President. If they were really serious about addressing the dire fiscal circumstances of this nation, they would have had Paul Ryan, a six-term congressman from Wisconsin, who has proposed the most serious plan of anyone in the two older parties to keep us from going off a fiscal cliff."Last week, Alan Auerbach, Professor of Economics and Law at UC Berkeley and US government fiscal policy expert, said that the Democratic and Republican parties are in a 'death embrace' with their government spending. The only political party that is rationally and forthrightly addressing the need to cut government spending and end our culture of ever expanding entitlements is the Libertarian Party."As Americans lose hope in Obama, we Libertarians are warning voters against running back to the Republicans who got us into such big messes in the first place. Republicans started the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Republicans made the false intellectual case for bailing out banks and car companies. Republicans argued that deficits don't matter. Republicans gave us the giant Medicare expansion bill."The President's suggestion of a 'spending freeze' was especially ludicrous and insulting to the intelligence of Americans. The amounts involved are minuscule, and Congress won't accept them anyway. Will Obama sign the spending bills that ignore his 'freeze'? You bet he will. Instead, the President should demand across-the-board cuts in all areas, including entitlements."The President talked a lot about jobs. Unfortunately, the policies he supports are responsible for most of the unemployment we see today. High taxes, minimum wage laws, hiring regulations, firing regulations, mandatory unemployment benefits, and other government interference make it much more difficult for businesses to hire and keep employees. As expected, the President's prescription is to increase the dosage of this government poison."While our nation is declining dangerously right now, a turnaround could be straightforward and simple with steps like these: 1. Bring our troops home from Iraq and Afghanistan; 2. Stop rewarding failed companies with bailouts; 3. Cut taxes and spending and let the free market work."Finally, on the matter of political rhetoric, I call upon the two older parties to stop spoon feeding politics to the American people as if we are a bunch of overgrown children. These are difficult times that call for more than rhetorical flourish or positioning a group of diverse people around a politician. Older party politicians need to be specific about their proposed policies, as Libertarians are."And, I know I'm probably just wasting electrons, but can't we go back to the days in which the President sent a copy of his speech to Congress and left it at that. The speech last night took 1/7000th of an entire year. I think the vast majority of the American people would agree that we have better ways to spend our time."William Redpath has served as the Chairman of the Libertarian Party since 2006.For more information, or to arrange an interview, call LP Executive Director Wes Benedict at 202-333-0008 ext. 222.The LP is America's third-largest political party, founded in 1971. The Libertarian Party stands for free markets and civil liberties. You can find more information on the Libertarian Party at our website.

Avatar is Great and Libertarian

2010-01-08T09:12:00.000-08:00

I knew it - there had to be a reason that I enjoyed Avatar (besides the CGI, Cameron behind the controls, the 3D, and everything else) - I recommend the film highly!!! Interesting article by Stephan Kinsella from our friends at the Ludwig Von Mises Institute:

Avatar is Great and Libertarian

Conservative Libertarianism's Comeback

2010-01-08T09:03:00.000-08:00

Excellent article by David Paul Kuhn, over at Real Clear Politics (if you haven't check out this site, you need to, as you keep up on what's happening to this government, and this country):

Conservative Libertarianism's Comeback

Great points made, demonstrating that Americans are usually right of center, and President Obama was able to present himself to his base as the alternative to Bush - unfortunately, the Bush Administration made it too easy for him, as he still is attacking the ghosts of the past government, and now he'll have to stand on his own - but with the virtually free pass from the "drive-by" media, slowly the people are realizing that they participated in oldest game in the book, politics at it's worst, as a political ponzai scheme.

Now, it's your time to take back government - it's no longer the days of "Ask not what your government can do for you..." it's time to do for ourselves, and government needs to get out of the way!!!

HIstory Repeats Itself (Obama Just Doesn't Get It)

2009-12-29T07:38:00.000-08:00

Passing this along - great message:

RECENT VIRGINIA CHURC H SERVICE

STIMULUS SERMON Genesis 47:13-27 I would love to give the Pastor of this predominantly black church in Virginia a hug and a high five. This guy is obviously a leader Perhaps we should each decide who our real leader is....It is amazing to see that very little has changed in 4,000 years. ---------------------------------------------------Good morning, brothers and sisters; it's always a delight to see the pews crowded on Sunday morning, and so eager to get into God's Word. Turn with me in your Bibles, if you will to the 47th chapter of Genesis, we'll begin our reading at verse 13, and go through verse 27. Brother Ray, would you stand and read that great passage for us? ....(reading)... Thank you for that fine reading, Brother Ray... So we see that economic hard times fell upon Egypt , and the people turned to the government of Pharaoh to deal with this for them. And Pharaoh nationalized the grain harvest, and placed the grain in great storehouses that he had built. So the people brought their money to Pharaoh, like a great tax increase, and gave it all to him willingly in return for grain. And this went on until their money ran out, and they were hungry again. So when they went to Pharaoh after that, they brought their livestock -their cattle, their horses, their sheep, and their donkey - to barter for grain, and verse 17 says that only took them through the end of that year.. But the famine wasn't over, was it? So the next year, the people came before Pharaoh and admitted they had nothing left, except their land and their own lives. "There is nothing left in the sight of my lord but our bodies and our land. Why should we die before your eyes, both we and our land? Buy us and our land for food, and we with our land will be servants to Pharaoh." So they surrendered their homes, their land, and their real estate to Pharaoh's government, and then sold themselves into slavery to him, in return for grain. What can we learn from this, brothers and sisters? That turning to the government instead of to God to be our provider in hard times only leads to slavery? Yes. That the only reason government wants to be our provider is to also become our master? Yes. But look how that passage ends, brothers and sisters! Thus Israel settled in the land of Egypt , in the land of Goshen .. And they gained possessions in it, and were fruitful and multiplied greatly." God provided for His people, just as He always has! They didn't end up giving all their possessions to government, no, it says they gained possessions! But I also tell you a great truth today, and an ominous one. We see the same thing happening today - the government today wants to "share the wealth "once again, to take it from us and redistribute it back to us. It wants to take control of healthcare, just as it has taken control of education, and ration it back to us, and when government rations it, then government decides who gets it, and how much, and what kind. And if we go along with it, and do it willingly, then we will wind up no differently than the people of Egypt did four thousand years ago - as slaves to the government, and as slaves to our leaders. What Mr. Obama's government is doing now is no different from what Pharaoh's government did then, and it will end the same. And a lot of people like to call Mr. Obama a "Messiah," don't they? Is he a Messiah? A savior? Didn't the Egyptians say, after Pharaoh made them his slaves, "You have saved our lives; may it please my lord, we will be servants to Pharaoh"? Well, I tell you this - I know the Messiah; the Messiah is a friend of mine; and Mr. Obama is no Messiah! No, brothers and sisters, if Mr. Obama is a character from the Bible, then he is Pharaoh. Bow with me in prayer, if you will. Lord, You alone are worthy to be served, and we rely on You, and You alone. We confess that the government is not our deliverer, and never rightly will be. We read in the eighth chapter of 1 Samuel, when Samuel warned the people of what a ruler would do, where it says "And in that day you will cry out because of your king, whom you have chosen for yourselves, but the LORD will not answer you in that day." And Lord, we acknowledge that day has come. We cry out to you because of the ruler that we have chosen for ourselves as a nation. Lord, we pray for this nation. We pray for revival, and we pray for deliverance from those who would be our masters. Give us hearts to seek You and hands to serve You, and protect Your people from the atrocities of Pharaoh's government. In God We Trust...

One Step Closer to the Governmental Apocalypse - No More Choice

2009-12-24T05:38:00.000-08:00

Just another nail in the coffin holding Free Choice with the Senate vote 60-39 on Health Care - soon there will be nothing left, that will give future researchers any evidence that this was once a proud example of Capitalism & Free Choice - The Senate and House will pass this disgusting piece of legislation, which promised Health Care for All (and doesn't do any of that) - the thought police will run rampant, as more words will be twisted to fit the premise the Government is good and good and can only be achieved by Government, since it's good - love the circular argument, saddened by the demise of original thought, with this mandate that requires Americans buy insurance - please show me where in the Constitution this exists? - but don't let the Democrats allow you the rain on their parade - if planned carefully, this package will finally pass around Mayday (isn't that when the communist countries have their celebrations - no we are ONE - the first major step for the New World Order - I had always thought that was just conspiracy theory, but today - this adds to ample evidence that it is true) - We don't need Santa, government has just handed out gifts to special interests and political cowards, with all of us picking up the tab (luckily the debt ceiling has been raised to 12.9 trillion - while Obama announces that this will reduce the deficit).

From our friends at the Wall Street Journal Blog - a breakdown of the numbers in this political power grab:

"The Senate just passed its version of the health-care bill by a vote of 60-39. Over the next month or so, the Senate and House will try to work out the differences between the bills.
Here’s a quick overview of some of the key effects of the Senate bill, based on estimates from CBO and the Joint Committee on Taxation for the years 2010-2019.
$395 billion in federal spending to expand the number of people covered by Medicaid and CHIP, insurance programs for the poor.
$436 billion in federal spending pay for health-insurance exchanges that would largely be used by people who don’t get health insurance through work. Most of that money would be in the form of subsidies for insurance premiums for people earning up to four times the poverty level.
$398 billion in new taxes. That includes the tax on high-value health-insurance plans, new fees on health insurers and drug and device makers, and higher payroll taxes for high earners.
$483 billion in cuts to projected spending for Medicare and other programs. This includes reductions in projected costs for privately administered Medicare Advantage programs and a new formula likely to lower annual increases in payments to hospitals.
31 million additional people would have health insurance by 2019 because of the bill.
23 million people in this country would still be uninsured."

So you know who to vote out in the next election - we've had historic votes in the past, but they were reached in a Bi-partisan manner - this was a disgusting power grab by the Democrats who see government as the solution, ultimately removing all options and choices, so that right or wrong, government is your only choice. The hypocrites, the supposed moderate Democrats who voted only after the gifts handed to them by the Democratic leadership - fortunately, we will remove many of them in 2010, but unfortunately, the damage has been done - and most of the American people will wake up far too late.

Sarah Palin: A True Libertarian!

2009-12-09T09:20:00.001-08:00

I've always been a supporter of the Great Man: Ronald Reagan - his principles which he never wavered from, allowed America to stand tall in the world, through the emphasis on less government, less taxes and more liberty! I believe there is a new leader to take the mantle that is tragically left wanting ever since the Great Man passed away: Sarah Palin!

She has taken on the forces that have set out to destroy her, and our way of life, and they would have succeeded with any lesser person would have given up - but she marches forward - below is a message I sent to her facebook page, and I recommend you join her page as well - as a true libertarian with Reagan's values and Patriotic values:

"Congrats Sarah, keep fighting the good fight - with rumors swirling about possible political endeavors, I feel the Republican establishment has done everything it can, to muffle your voice, as demonstrated with the 2008 election - your voice speaks to the independents/those who don't identify as republicans and democrats - though many of the rank in file supported you - if you do consider a run - and we've all heard the independent/third party trial balloons being voiced in the media, please consider the Libertarian Party - when you were announced as a candidate for VP, my first thought was "finally, the libertarian on the ticket." God Bless, and best of luck, whatever you decide to do - you have my vote!"

Here's hoping the Sarah continues to blaze her own path, and I have to believe that the Great Man is looking down and smiling!

The End of Democracy!

2009-11-13T06:22:00.000-08:00

This is the most interesting thing I've read in a long time. The sad thing about it, you can see it coming.

I have always heard about this democracy countdown. It is interesting to see it in print. God help us, not that we deserve it.

How Long Do We Have?

About the time our original thirteen states adopted their new constitution in 1787, Alexander Tyler, a Scottish history professor at the University of Edinburgh , had this to say about the fall of the Athenian Republic some 2,000 years earlier:

'A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government.'

'A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury.'

' From that moment on, the majority always vote for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy, which is always followed by a dictatorship.'

'The average age of the world's greatest civilizations from the beginning of history, has been about 200 years'

'During those 200 years, those nations always progressed through the following sequence:

1. from bondage to spiritual faith;

2. from spiritual faith to great courage;

3. from courage to liberty;

4. from liberty to abundance;

5. from abundance to complacency;

6. from complacency to apathy;

7. from apathy to dependence;

8. from dependence back into bondage'

Professor Joseph Olson of Hemline University School of Law, St. Paul , Minnesota points out some interesting facts concerning the 2008 Presidential election:

Number of States won by:
Democrats: 19
Republicans: 29

Square miles of land won by:
Democrats: 580,000 Republicans: 2,427,000

Population of counties won by:
Democrats: 127 million Republicans: 143 million

Murder rate per 100,000 residents in counties won by: Democrats: 13.2
Republicans: 2.1

Professor Olson adds: 'In aggregate, the map of the territory Republican won was mostly the land owned by the taxpaying citizens of this great country. Democrat territory mostly encompassed those citizens living in government-owned tenements and living off various forms of government welfare...' Olson believes the United States is somewhere between the 'complacency and apathy' phase of Professor Tyler's definition of democracy, with some forty percent of the nation's population already having reached the 'governmental dependency' phase.

If Congress grants amnesty and citizenship to twenty million criminal invaders called illegal's and they vote, then we can say goodbye to the USA in fewer than five years.

If you are in favor of this, then by all means, ignor this message. If you are not, then pass this along to help everyone realize just how much is at stake, knowing that apathy is the greatest danger to our freedom.

WE LIVE IN THE LAND OF THE FREE, ONLY BECAUSE OF THE BRAVE

Obama receives the NOBEL PEACE PRIZE!!!????

2009-10-11T05:40:00.000-07:00

A rare picture of the Nobel committee gives us some insight as to why they choose Jimmy Carter in 2002, Al Gore a couple years back, and the "anointed one" this year!

How on earth can someone be chosen on potential as an incentive to make peace? It would be like giving someone who is thinking about making a movie the Oscar, since those who are in the movie business already don't need the incentive! Next he'll receive the Cy Young award since he has been to a ballpark and threw out the first pitch, badly as it bounced to the plate, but why not, it's an incentive to be better the next time. What did he receive it for? The beer summit? Because he isn't George Bush (and isn't that why each of these idiots received the award)? Read Atlas Shrugged, all the signs are there (there are some even trying to make the "revelation - ends of times - antichrist" argument, but I don't want to go there, nor believe it) and it's time for all of us to get the "Galt" out of here!

On 10/9, the Libertarian party issued the following press release about President Obama's Nobel Prize:
The Libertarian Party today suggested that, in the future, the announcement date every year for Nobel Prizes be moved to April 1.
"Unlike the gullible people who listened to The War of the Worlds radio broadcast in 1938 and thought Martians really were attacking the United States, when I heard this morning that Barack Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize, I changed the channel in disbelief. But, the same thing was being said in multiple places," Libertarian National Committee Chairman William Redpath said.
"The gravity of the Nobel awards has not been augmented by some of their recent selections, including today's announcement, last year's award of the Economics prize to Paul Krugman, or the 2007 Peace Prize to Al Gore, whose global warming theories he will not defend in open debate. Maybe an early Springtime announcement date would be more appropriate."
Redpath continued, "I didn't know that it was the role of the Nobel Peace Prize Committee to be handicapping the future performance of individuals and organizations. Nonetheless, we congratulate President Obama on his award and hope that three-and-a-quarter or seven-and-a-quarter years from now the Nobel Peace Prize Committee will be seen as prescient.
"President Obama will best fulfill the promise of peace that the Nobel Committee apparently sees in him by not trying to cure all the ills of the world, but by working to make the United States an example for the other nations of the world through implementation of a Libertarian foreign policy--military non-interventionism combined with free trade policies in fact, and not just in rhetoric. With those guiding principles, the world will be a freer, safer and more prosperous planet at the conclusion of the Obama Administration."

The Four Horsemen of the Free Market

2009-09-23T17:47:00.000-07:00

It must have been "Bring a Despot to Tea" day at the United Nations (which must be disbanded - if this wasn't the last straw, I don't what is) as Gaddafi, Chavez, Ahmadinejad, and Obama spoke (North Korea's leader for life, and Castro as well, must have had other countries to overrun) - the only one who kept the seats warm was the "chosen one," as the others carried far too much baggage, that even the idiot in the UN couldn't put up with them, marching out en masse. You can look up each of these dictator's speeches, as the leftists have drooled over each in various stages of adolation, but it just demonstrates so many things that are wrong with the UN, and Obama's New World Order.

Tea Party Day - Thanks for the Coverage

2009-09-13T06:37:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was a great day to let the government officials know what we really think - as it seems they've been living in a glass bubble, or some such nonsense. While their outrage over Representative Wilson's "You Lie" (God Bless you - finally someone in Washington with a pair - help this guy out http://joewilsonforcongress.com/) to the President (and for the record, he did lie - as abortion will be covered, and illegal immigrants will be covered - though the loophole has been changed since then) during his bulleted outline off his beloved teleprompter of all the things achieved in Utopia (located way to the left of the USA), since they definitely will not actually occur in the Health Care bill itself has sent them over the edge, at the same time feeding at the financial trough, paid for by those same people protesting in DC, and treated as "mobs," "nazis," "kkk," and astroturf," (and those are just the nice words) - the networks did their part, by not covering the event, except for Fox News.

Maybe it's time for us to consider some of the things that work in other countries, since the supporters of Health Care Reform love to bring up how great health care is in every country but ours (which obviously isn't true, but that's never stopped the leftinistas before). How about a parliamentary system which allows for more representation than the captive two party behemoths we currently have? How about true freedom of speech as heard in the parliament, such as in Britain, without the threat of censuring elected officials (and I recommend contributing early and often to Representative Wilson's campaign, the left has already handed his opponent over $1 million dollars - we need to help), and here's a crazy notion - how about listening to the people who elected you, as you as our leaders follow "lock-step" towards the destruction of our system?

We can have every camera trained on Washington DC if we have the Million man march (when 100,000 actually show up) or Greening protestors who claim that Global Warming is on the move (it actually is, as temperatures have been dropping over the years, and thousands of scientists have shown that the warming craze by these loons doesn't exist - hence the new name Climate Change, again with the same results, less change in your pocket), but when real patriots take over the Capital, not a peep - they're busy covering all the nasty people who aren't Democrats - while the vidiots like Olber-woman, Christine Matthews, and the only man on MSNBC, Rachel Maddows continue their worship of Dough-bama. We have entered the rabbit hole, in the looking glass.

You know, maybe Bill Maher is right, the American people are stupid - but only the ones who voted for Obama, and even worse, the number of them that are still supporting NO-bama! Can you honestly believe this? How about this - those who still believe in the CHOSEN ONE - you send your money - oh, you won't? It's much easier to send others money - that's what I thought (sidebar: did you notice that the little TARP monies that actually went out - around 20% around this writing has virtually all gone to the districts that voted Democrat - look it up. And another point, if so little went out, and yet the economy is starting to turn around - which it would have faster, if left alone - then where did that other money go? To the 40 CZARS and their staffs, and the rest to MOVEON and ACORN, or maybe other moron talking heads like the people that come on CNN like my new favorite idiot (use big words around him, he loves it): Sam Tanenhaus who wrote The Death of Conservatism, since that didn't consider Conservatives best Friend, Barak who's negatives have done more to bring the conservatives back, since Ronald Reagan's positives???)

I am reminded of one of the best lines from a movie - V for Vendetta - "The citizens should not fear the government, government should fear the citizens." And are you curious which movie represents what's happening in our government right now? Well, since Atlas Shrugged hasn't been made into a movie - many argue this is actually the dramatization of the book -I'd suggest Titanic - just watch out for ice bergs? (and that wasn't a shot at Barney Frank, though that would most likely look like Teddy Kennedy)

9/11 - Never Forget (the Liberals sure did!)

2009-09-11T17:16:00.000-07:00

While the Obama cronies (which keep getting bigger with more looney czars added, while only one so far quit - he must have really screwed up - is that even possible in this administration - who knows, may be he's the only one who paid his taxes - that would look bad for the rest of the future crooks-in-waiting) attack everything that moves, and manage to have more lives, by hypnotizing the American public - don't look behind the curtain - while trying to recognize 9/11 without criticizing terrorists (which we can't say anymore) or offending anyone who attempted to blow us up - it's important for the intelligent people (unfortunately seems to be only those who didn't vote for the Messiah, though we are starting to see some cracks with the least amount of buyers remorse - though it seems like the "attacks" - basic pillow fights - are from those on the left, who can't believe we're not entirely Socialist by now - give it time, comrade!!!

9/11 - Never Forget!!!

Censorship Rears It's Ugly Head - Again, and Again, and...

2009-09-04T13:13:00.000-07:00

Recently heard about the removal of a column by Pat Buchanan from MSNBCs website which extend from his current book Churchill, Hitler, and the Unneccessary War, because of an uprising of condemnation from various organizations. As Michael Calderone states from Politico.com:

"Pat Buchanan has received a lot of criticism recently for his column marking the 70th anniversary of the Nazi invasion of Poland, where the conservative pundit questions whether Hitler has gotten a bum rap.
By extension, MSNBC, where Buchanan is a commentator, has taken heat for promoting the column on its website. In the revisionist piece -- "Did Hitler Want War?" -- Buchanan argues that other countries, such as Poland, should be held responsible for the invasion, and later escalation of World War II. Hitler, he claims, wanted peace and wasn't out for world conquest. David A. Harris, President of the National Jewish Democratic Council, condemned MSNBC's promotion of the "deplorable" column and urged that it be removed from MSNBC.com.
Well, now the network has pulled it. (Indeed, the old link is dead). Harris, in second statement, said that "MSNBC took the responsible action and removed Pat Buchanan's column," while adding that "no worthy news organization should employ and promote a commentator who engages in such vile fiction." An MSNBC spokesperson issued a statement to POLITICO: "An editorial decision was made to remove the column from msnbc.com. Pat is a contributor to MSNBC, his syndicated column does not speak for the network or represent the views of MSNBC"

While I've had an opportunity to read the column in question (it is available on Pat Buchanan's blog site, which is linked with the title, but who knows how long) - I thought there were interesting points and can see while Buchanan calls Hitler a beast, his questions have made many uncomfortable that they are even questions, and there were many areas that I had to disagree with, particularly the points that give you the impression that Hitler was "forced" to attack, and didn't want world domination at all, which I disagree with strongly, having read all the historical texts, and Mein Kampf itself. What I found most fascinating were the comments after the column - removing the absolutists who condemned Buchanan because he dare mention Hitler in any non-negative light, and those who found conspiracies other either the Germans or the Jews or (fill in the blank) to blame for all the world's ills, I recommend reading the more knowledgeable comments presenting info allowing us to debate and make our own decisions.

I personally feel Hitler was truly a madman of epic proportions, so vile in his attempt to create and preserve the master race, that all in his way must be destroyed, for him to truly feel success, and world domination was definitely on his mind, as he felt a german "motherland" including all of europe, including Russia, that no conquest would be unfathomnable - that having been said, I have a concern about censorship - any kind of censorship. Reading his article, allows us to read the comments and discussions after having read it, rather than the debate from hearing snippits or self-determined summaries of what may/may not have been said.

It's interesting, that we seem to come together when it comes to Government censorship (for the most part) but when it's a ideology, whether left or right, that is pushing for censorship, we turn the other way, ignoring the outcome. That's sad, because that is usually the most insidious of them all, and before you know it, we'll censor everything that may offend or question, or even (gasp) make someone think - and we wouldn't want to have that, would we???

My New Favorite Idiot: Melissa Lafsky

2009-09-01T04:58:00.000-07:00

After all the lionizing of the "Liberal Lion," just when you thought every single angle has been covered, you read this from a couple of our favorite kitty litter sites, the Huffingtonpost.com and Opionistas.com, that basically states the Mary Jo Kepechne would have thought dying was worth it, for the elevation of Teddy Kennedy's career - are you kidding me? This from the person who is the new editor of Freakonomics blog with the New York Times (which used to be one of my favorite books). I am including this post entirely, as I have to believe that the aforementioned sites would have the decency to remove this column, but of course, what am I thinking, they are the Huffingtonpost.com and Opionistas.com - the more offensive, the better:

"The Footnote Speaks: What Would Mary Jo Kopechne Have Thought of Ted's Career?
Melissa Lafsky, August 27, 2009, Huffington Post

We're comfortable with moral relativism in this country -- or, at least, we love us a good "sinned and redeemed" narrative. And, for the most part, we realize that there are few lives on which we can slap a "Good" or "Evil" label and expect it to be accurate.
Which, let's face it, is one of the reasons the Ted Kennedy story is so fascinating. The huge achievements, weighed against the huge sins. Forty-six years of history-book accomplishments on everything from Civil Rights to the Americans with Disabilities Act to gender equality. Disabled? Poor? A member of any minority group? Then chances are your life is at least somewhat better because of Ted Kennedy. And for anyone who started to lose faith in the left's seeming impotence over the past decade (cough cough) he provided a pretty strong reason not to throw in the towel.
So now he's dead, and we do what we do when a Kennedy dies: read and write obsessively about him. Some of the obituaries are point-counterpoint parallels of sin with salvation. Then there are obsequious, grandiose bromides like:
He was a Rabelaisian figure in the Senate and in life, instantly recognizable by his shock of white hair, his florid, oversize face, his booming Boston brogue, his powerful but pained stride. He was a celebrity, sometimes a self-parody, a hearty friend, an implacable foe, a man of large faith and large flaws, a melancholy character who persevered, drank deeply and sang loudly. He was a Kennedy.
Good grief.
But in all the florid or scalpel-sharp prose, there's one constant: Peeking out from the center of the story is the matter of his playing a major part in the death of a 28-year-old woman.
Mary Jo wasn't a right-wing talking point or a negative campaign slogan. She was a dedicated civil rights activist and political talent with a bright future -- granted, whenever someone dies young, people sermonize about how he had a "bright future" ahead of him -- but she actually did. She wasn't afraid to defy convention (28 and unmarried, oh the horror!) or create her own career path based on her talents. She lived in Georgetown (where I grew up) and loved the Red Sox (we'll forgive her for that). Then she got in a car driven by a 36-year-old senator with an alcohol problem and a cauldron full of demons, and wound up a controversial footnote in a dynasty.
We don't know how much Kennedy was affected by her death, or what she'd have thought about arguably being a catalyst for the most successful Senate career in history. What we don't know, as always, could fill a Metrodome.
Still, ignorance doesn't preclude a right to wonder. So it doesn't automatically make someone (aka, me) a Limbaugh-loving, aerial-wolf-hunting NRA troll for asking what Mary Jo Kopechne would have had to say about Ted's death, and what she'd have thought of the life and career that are being (rightfully) heralded.
Who knows -- maybe she'd feel it was worth it.
This post originally appeared on Opinionistas.com."

Robert Gibbs: International Man of Mystery!?!

2009-08-31T11:01:00.000-07:00

Our favorite punching bag from the Obama administration (since we can't get hold of the big O-man himself, who's either handing out bailouts to his friends, on vacation, or walking on water) - enjoy the videos of Sgt. Schultz, we mean Sgt. Gibbs - not doctored, actual presentations by Gibbs (or silly G as we like to call him)

http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=robert+gibbs&search_type=&aq=f

And this is just classic Gibbs B.S. vs. Rick Santelli
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sCQ9xb4CBeI

From politico.com:

"The United States is facing its biggest financial crisis in ages. North Korea is blowing up nukes. Dick Cheney warns us of the "dangers that have not gone away." And there are still wars raging in Afghanistan and Iraq.
But over in the White House press briefing room, it’s a veritable laugh riot.
Whenever there’s laughter in the James S. Brady Briefing Room — by either the briefer or the briefed — the official White House stenographer indicates as much by inserting “(Laughter.)” into the transcript.
And in Robert Gibbs’ first four months as President Barack Obama’s press secretary, there have been more than 600 instances of “(Laughter.)” during his regular press briefings — an average of more than 10 laughs per day.
It’s a gaudy statistic — and one that puts his predecessors to shame.
Dana Perino, George W. Bush’s last press secretary, got all of 57 laughs in her first four months. Scott McClellan, another Bush press secretary, got just 66 laughs in his first four months.
Gibbs even bests the late Tony Snow, whose jocular performances — dubbed “The Tony Snow Show” by some — drew a relatively paltry 217 laughs during his first four months on the job.
Tim Graham, who watches for liberal press bias at the Media Research Center, says all the high times may be a sign of reporters’ political affinity with the Obama administration.

Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0509/23015.html#ixzz0PmmDVxOs"

Obviously, most of this is unintentional, though who knows with the entire Obama administration demonstrating they're nothing but a joke, what else could it be? And did you catch that last sentence above "may be a sign of reporters' political affinity with the Obama administration." YOU THINK??? The media bias has been achieving catastrophic levels with warm fuzzies everytime Obama enters the room with his teleprompter, as this administration can do no wrong, from increase in bailouts, increase in deficits, socialized medicine, interrogation in the white house, possible defeat in Afghanistan, 33 CZARS and counting, creation of a National Service army, and overall government malfeasance - but hey, it's your ride - I just shouldn't have to pay for it!!!

Health Care: State Control Bad, Federal Control Good - My Union Tells Me So!!!

2009-08-30T17:05:00.000-07:00

In the State of Michigan (or the State of Confusion, or when it comes to the Obama supporters - the State of Denial) according to some of the drivel presented by the MEA, and it's conduit, the TCEA (Union thugs to you and me), it's okay for the Federal Government to control your health care as Obama has the unions in his hip pocket, but when it comes to the state of Michigan, and proposed by someone who doesn't bend over for the union, then it's not so good. Read the message sent to me by one of the drones and worker bees:

"This is a “first look” analysis to Speaker Dillon’s Draft Bill creating the “ Michigan Health Benefits Program Act”. We will be doing a more extensive analysis of the bill over the weekend and into the first part of the week for more specific points on which we can base recommendations for reaction and activities. Also, keep in mind that the Bill currently is labeled Draft “A” which leads one to believe that it may be modified even before it goes before the committee.

The bill clearly creates a mandatory government-run state health plan for all public employees and retirees. Eliminates collective bargaining rights. Creates a public health plan option for individuals and private organizations. Puts state government between doctors and patients. Doesn't address what really matters -- the real drivers of health care costs. This is not a legislative process to do good public policy: it is a tightly scripted roll-out of a gubernatorial campaign.
The Speaker's legislation (Michigan Health Benefits Program Act):
creates a mandatory state government-run health plan housed in the Department of Management and Budget, governed by a state Health Benefits Board and administered by the Office of State Employer
mandates participation of all state, local, city, college, township, and county governments, agencies, school districts, public school academies, ISDs, community colleges, and public universities as well as all public retirement systems, obtain employee health plans from the state benefits plan Sec. 21(2), page 13
eliminates collective bargaining (public employers and employees would be limited in choosing from the menu of plans and plan designs approved by the Health Benefits Board) Sec. 7(a), Page 4 and Sec. 11(c), Page 6
mandates that all local governments participate in the state government-run health plan -- and requires that all local governments are also financially liable for any budget shortfalls in the state-run fund Sec. 20, Page 12
creates a state health benefits fund in the Department of Treasury Sec. 18(1), Page 10
creates a public health plan by allowing individuals and organizations in the private sector to purchase coverage from the state Health Benefits plan Sec. 7(h), Page 7
creates a new level of bureaucracy in state government within the Office of State Employer. Sec 10, Page 5
puts state government between doctors and their patients and gives government a major role in patient health care decisions by mandating "use of clinical advocates to review diagnoses and care for correct treatment." Sec. 12(e), Page 7
gives the Office of State Employer authority to create a new bureaucracy, and hire an executive director and staff to administer the program Sec. 13(c), Page 8
allows local governments to opt-out of the program if they pay for an actuarial study proving that the plan they offer is more than five percent less expensive than the state-run plan. Sec. 19(2), Page 11"

Now, my response:

"Make sure you read all the information, not just what is presented by one side:

From the Detroit Free Press - disputes several points in the post from the Union mouthpiece

Here's the copy of the actual bill - (and located at this website )which is not what the Union mouthpiece says - don't let anyone disseminate the information, you need to read it and make your own decision

I don't want to see breakdowns or bulleted talking points to make the decisions for us - we're smart - send us the bill itself, and let us make our own informed decisions without bias or pressure - if you like or dislike the plan voice your opinion, but don't let any group tell you what to do. I'll be honest, I haven't decided but I will research it myself, and I know I'm not going to let any group supposedly make my informed decisions for me."

So what have we learned today - trust no one, how can you tell a politician is lying - their lips move, and always check out the facts yourself without being pressured by those who are in the know (or in the tank, or in the pocket).

My New Favorite Idiot: Kurt Anderson!!!

2009-08-30T07:43:00.001-07:00

Obama supporter - while trying not to show any bias on CNN Reliable Sources (and failing miserably), Kurt Anderson from NPR, New York Times and Time magazine - in partnership with CNN - a conflict of interest which wasn't reported in this piece - do I smell a Pulitzer? Maybe a Nobel Prize - Paul Krugman received one without any discernible talent or trait except that he's an unapologetic liberal who believes government is the only solution (of course no bias from any of those "reliable sources" - NPR, New York Times, or Time - throw in NBC/MSNBC, and you'd have the four horsemen of the political and economic apocalypse) - who tries to act like he knows more than everyone else and deigns to bloviate to us from on high, having finished written the latest rag, RESET (pointless drivel that only your cat, or his mom would love) explaining how our society will no longer be involved in a name calling process in just a couple years with our new administration, while he complained about the "nuttiness of idiots" (his words) like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh - amazing - with a straight face. Even the Moderator kept trying to give him some extra rope, which he kept creating a hangman's noose. [Sidenote - Later the moderator criticized Glenn Beck for not disclosing information about a person he was reporting on (Mark LLoyd the new FCC Diversity Czar from the Color of Change organization that started the boycott on Beck's show - these liberals are so tolerant, unless you disagree with them) - which Beck had, but we digress - while not disclosing this conflict of using a Time magazine-CNN reporter on his own program in Reliable Sources]

So we did a little research on this supposedly unbiased reporter - first from his twitter page -

"On Twitter: Kurt Andersen
@wodekszemberg Yes -- my word-loathing party already includes impact as a verb, and many, many more. It's a big-tent party. - 14 hours ago
I'm disappointed in Obama for the first time: in his EMK eulogy today he used the unnaceptable "penned" as a synonym for "wrote." - 16 hours ago
Just drove eldest kid back to Vassar. Surprised & oddly pleased to see Reagan portrait taped on a dorm room window facing out. Diversity! - 16 hours ago "

The first "tweet," reminds me of 1984 with the goal of removing as many "wasteful" words as possible, perhaps Anderson is auditioning for a job in the current administration?
The second "tweet," definitely shows no bias (and actually no honest reporting) in his bro-mance with Obama - good objective coverage - that's what we like to see!
The third "tweet," is actually stunning - a Reagan portrait at Vassar (public school education, this is not) - must be a result from one of their "diversity - get in touch with your feelings, since you've offended everyone" training seminars!

These comments from one medium, demonstrating no bias (?) or a person above it all (?) or even super rich (?), needs to be compared to his own comments (written? penned? how about drawn with crayons, or scratched on a cave wall - I like those ones) from his RESET blog on Time.com:

"In ">Reset, I range pretty widely over politics, economics, pop culture and more. And as I finish my blogging for Time.com this week (thanks, Time.com!), I'm struck by the hopeful reset signs I continue to see all over the place.
In the book, I write about Hollywood's imminent reality check, how $20-million-a-picture movie stars' dull autopilot films may be about to be a thing of the past. Well, sure enough, here's today's New York Times, with a front–page story about how the summer's movie-star-fronted ">movies bombed.
Also in today's Times is a long piece confirming my central, hopeful Reset argument that that the quarter-century party's finally, really over for the super-rich. Meanwhile, the Fed chairman today “offered his most hopeful assessment in more than a year,” declaring that “the prospects for a return to growth in the near term ">appear good.”
And in the current New Yorker, Rick Hertzberg explains how California's profound political dysfunction may be about to reset radically, producing a state constitutional convention whose re-founders would be chosen randomly. Awesome.
It's the end of the world as we've known it. Sanity and common sense are returning. The new age is dawning."

Now, to be fair, I'm sure he was the kid who was always picked last in any event, and probably got tired of being stuffed in lockers in school (must have had plenty of time to write about his utopia, but maybe the airholes weren't big enough) - though those flashbacks must be tough, with the kinds of "oppressed people" (don't believe me, just ask them) who hang out at NPR (another public assistance program), though they can all feel empathy for one another, since they've all faced the shame - and with a face for radio, he has risen high in the ranks on the backs of the downtrodden - I'm surprised the whole crew at NPR hasn't pushed for the banning of lockers, though we do see the push for free and reduced lunches (probably because they all got tired of having their lunch money taken), but don't worry, Obama still has 1200 days of America's occupation to do so.

Humor for the Humorless (Coming to a Socialized Country near You)

2009-08-30T07:28:00.000-07:00

"An old guy's wife tells him to go to the butcher shop and get some meat. He goes to the butcher shop and stands in line for hours. Finally the butcher says, "We're out of meat." The old guy blows his top. He yells, "I am a worker! I am a proletarian! I am a veteran of the Great Patriotic War! I have fought for socialism all my life, and now you tell me you're out of meat! What kind of a system is this?! You are fools! You are thieves! . . . " A big man in a trench coat comes up to the old guy and says, "Comrade, Comrade, not so loud. In the old days you know what they would do if you said such things." The big man in the trench coat makes a pistol motion with his hand. He says to the old guy, "Calm down and go home." The old guy shrugs and leaves. He comes back empty-handed, and his wife says, "What's the matter, are they out of meat?" "Worse than that," says the old guy, "they're out of bullets."

An old Russian joke, as told by the one and only PJ O'Rourke.

Post-American World?

2009-08-29T09:14:00.000-07:00

I see our President is preparing for a post-American world - the only way this would be possible is with the current-Obama world with constant government intervention keeping us from growing to our fullest potential - I guess his nightstand is too full of Alinsky, Marx, Ayers, Wright, and Zakaria to read Lewis, Orwell, Rand, and Paul which he should, since they are written about him and what this government is doing to us! You think the bailouts and health care plans are something - wait until you see the Cyber Security bill S. 773 coming up next that will give control of the internet to the President when he declares a state of emergency (which could be anytime someone disagrees with him - so be prepared). The complete bill is listed with our friends from opencongress.org

Ron Paul: We Need Sunlight to Disinfect the Legislative Process!

2009-08-27T07:19:00.000-07:00

Excellent post from Dr. Paul from the Campaign for Liberty site - we need to contact our congressmen and women and get them to pass H.Res. 216 - the Sunlight Rule today:

We Need Sunlight to Disinfect the Legislative Process!
By Ron Paul
Published 08/25/09

During August recess, many legislators have heard an unexpected amount of discontent from their constituents about what is happening on Capitol Hill, particularly regarding healthcare. Some people are justifiably terrified at what the government could do to healthcare, should it get its claws even further into it. Others demand a public option for health insurance and are adamant that healthcare be treated as yet another absolute entitlement. One thing everyone agrees on is that the final bill needs to be read and understood by all legislators before a vote is taken. To any American, this is common sense. In Washington, that is unlikely to happen. There is much confusion and debate over what is and is not in the reform plan being considered. Are there or are there not so-called death panels? What are the end-of-life consultations really for? How will private insurance be affected? Can you keep your current plan or will you eventually be forced into a government plan? Will it pay for elective abortions or not? What are the implications for medical privacy? The truth is no one knows what will be in the final bill until it is on the House floor, and provisions could be added in and taken out in the wee hours of the morning before. In February, the House was forced to vote on an over 1,000 page "stimulus" bill that had first been posted on the internet just after midnight the morning of the vote. It passed. Then in June, House leaders rushed a vote on the cap-and-trade bill, even though an over 300 page "manager’s amendment" making substantive changes to the bill, was introduced shortly after 3:00 a.m. the morning of the vote. Washington thrives on crisis. If enough people can be convinced that we are in an emergency, they will more likely tolerate rushing legislation to the floor like this. Last minute changes will be slipped in, benefitting who knows what special interests and at what expense to the taxpayer. But the mantra is repeated over and over: We are in a crisis. We must act immediately. It should be unconscionable for legislators to vote in favor of legislation they have not had the opportunity to read. This is why I have re-introduced the Sunlight Rule, H.Res 216. The Sunlight Rule prohibits any piece of legislation from being brought before the House of Representatives unless it has been available to read for at least 10 days. The Sunlight Rule allows citizens to move for censure of any House Member who votes for a bill in violation of this act. Because the Sunlight Rule could never be waived, any Member could raise a point of order requiring any bill in violation to be immediately pulled from the House calendar until it can be brought to the floor in a manner consistent with this rule. This rule does not require that Members read the bills. It merely guarantees the opportunity to do so. It has 4 cosponsors. Justice Louis Brandeis famously said, "Sunlight is the best disinfectant." The Sunlight Rule would do much towards negating the cycle of pseudo-crises and cleaning up the legislative process here in Washington. I sincerely hope this is the year Congress remembers its deliberative duties and passes it.

Obama's New World Order

2009-08-26T16:30:00.000-07:00

From the Tribune Media Services, this is the speech given by former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, January 20th, 2009, with my highlights - draw you're own conclusions - I'll be taking the main points in future posts, and showing many examples as to how this is coming about through this administration (Glen Beck may be right, as he states that the current government seems to be creating a shadow government that will shed it's parts, showing it's exoskeleton with it's Czars and government power grabs, and free market destruction - welcome to the machine):

"As the new US administration prepares to take office amid grave financial and international crises, it may seem counterintuitive to argue that the very unsettled nature of the international system generates a unique opportunity for creative diplomacy.
That opportunity involves a seeming contradiction. On one level, the financial collapse represents a major blow to the standing of the United States. While American political judgments have often proved controversial, the American prescription for a world financial order has generally been unchallenged. Now disillusionment with the United States' management of it is widespread.

At the same time, the magnitude of the debacle makes it impossible for the rest of the world to shelter any longer behind American predominance or American failings. Every country will have to reassess its own contribution to the prevailing crisis. Each will seek to make itself independent, to the greatest possible degree, of the conditions that produced the collapse; at the same time, each will be obliged to face the reality that its dilemmas can be mastered only by common action.

Even the most affluent countries will confront shrinking resources. Each will have to redefine its national priorities. An international order will emerge if a system of compatible priorities comes into being. It will fragment disastrously if the various priorities cannot be reconciled.

The nadir of the international financial system coincides with simultaneous political crises around the globe. Never have so many transformations occurred at the same time in so many different parts of the world and been made accessible via instantaneous communication. The alternative to a new international order is chaos.

The financial and political crises are, in fact, closely related partly because, during the period of economic exuberance, a gap had opened up between the economic and the political organisation of the world. The economic world has been globalised. Its institutions have a global reach and have operated by maxims that assumed a self-regulating global market. The financial collapse exposed the mirage. It made evident the absence of global institutions to cushion the shock and to reverse the trend. Inevitably, when the affected publics turned to their political institutions, these were driven principally by domestic politics, not considerations of world order. Every major country has attempted to solve its immediate problems essentially on its own and to defer common action to a later, less crisis-driven point.

So-called rescue packages have emerged on a piecemeal national basis, generally by substituting seemingly unlimited governmental credit for the domestic credit that produced the debacle in the first place, so far without achieving more than stemming incipient panic. International order will not come about either in the political or economic field until there emerge general rules toward which countries can orient themselves.

In the end, the political and economic systems can be harmonised in only one of two ways: by creating an international political regulatory system with the same reach as that of the economic world; or by shrinking the economic units to a size manageable by existing political structures, which is likely to lead to a new mercantilism, perhaps of regional units. A new Bretton Woods kind of global agreement is by far the preferable outcome.

America's role in this enterprise will be decisive. Paradoxically, American influence will be great in proportion to the modesty in our conduct; we need to modify the righteousness that has characterised too many American attitudes, especially since the collapse of the Soviet Union. That event and the subsequent period of nearly uninterrupted global growth induced too many to equate world order with the acceptance of American designs, including our domestic preferences. The result was a certain inherent unilateralism – the standard complaint of European critics – or else an insistent kind of consultation by which nations were invited to prove their fitness to enter the international system by conforming to American prescriptions.

Not since the inauguration of president John F Kennedy half a century ago has a new administration come into office with such a reservoir of expectations. It is unprecedented that all the principal actors on the world stage are avowing their desire to undertake the transformations imposed on them by the world crisis in collaboration with the United States.

The extraordinary impact of the President-elect on the imagination of humanity is an important element in shaping a new world order. But it defines an opportunity, not a policy. The ultimate challenge is to shape the common concern of most countries and all major ones regarding the economic crisis, together with a common fear of jihadist terrorism, into a strategy reinforced by the realisation that the new issues like proliferation, energy and climate change permit no national or regional solution.

The new administration could make no worse mistake than to rest on its initial popularity. The role of China in a new world order is crucial. A relationship that started on both sides as essentially a strategic design to constrain a common adversary has evolved over the decades into a pillar of the international system. China made possible the American consumption splurge by buying American debt; America helped the modernisation of the Chinese economy by opening its markets to Chinese goods.

Each side of the Pacific needs the cooperation of the other in addressing the consequences of the financial crisis. Now that the global financial collapse has devastated Chinese export markets, China is emphasising infrastructure development and domestic consumption. It will not be easy to shift gears rapidly, and the Chinese growth rate may fall temporarily below the 7.5 per cent that Chinese experts define as the line that challenges political stability.

What kind of global economic order arises will depend importantly on how China and America deal with each other over the next few years. A frustrated China may take another look at an exclusive regional Asian structure, for which the nucleus already exists in the ASEAN-plus-three concept. At the same time, if protectionism grows in America or if China comes to be seen as a long-term adversary, a self-fulfilling prophecy may blight the prospects of global order. Such a return to mercantilism and 19th-century diplomacy would divide the world into competing regional units with dangerous long-term consequences.

The Sino-American relationship needs to be taken to a new level. This generation of leaders has the opportunity to shape relations into a design for a common destiny, much as was done with trans-Atlantic relations in the postwar period – except that the challenges now are more political and economic than military.

The complexity of the emerging world requires from America a more historical approach than the insistence that every problem has a final solution expressible in programmes with specific time limits not infrequently geared to our political process. We must learn to operate within the attainable and be prepared to pursue ultimate ends by the accumulation of nuance. An international order can be permanent only if its participants have a share not only in building but also in securing it. In this manner, America and its potential partners have a unique opportunity to transform a moment of crisis into a vision of hope.

The author was National Security Adviser, 1969-75 and US Secretary of State, 1973-77. "

- Distributed by Tribune Media Services, Inc.

CZAR Wars - Truly biCZAR - Where is the Outrage?

2009-08-26T14:22:00.000-07:00

Just another example of why this may be one of the most dangerous times of our, and our country's, lives - as government is in the middle of the one of the greatest power grabs in U.S. (and possibly the World's) history - did even the Obama supporters really believe they voted for THIS????:

First, as Obama the candidate promised so much, with so much transparency, Obama the President is not delivering (truly an understatement) - from the Concord Monitor:

“The biggest problems that we’re facing right now have to do with George Bush trying to bring more and more power into the executive branch and not go through Congress at all. And that’s what I intend to reverse when I’m president of the United States.”
- Sen. Barack Obama, March 31, 2008

To say President Obama failed to follow through on this promise is an understatement. By appointing a virtual army of “czars” - each wholly unaccountable to Congress yet tasked with spearheading major policy efforts for the White House - the president has made an end-run around the legislative branch of historic proportions…. Vesting such broad authority in the hands of people not subjected to Senate confirmation and congressional oversight poses a grave threat to our system of checks and balances."

From our friends at American Daughter (they seem to have the most complete list of CZARs - which will keep multiplying as we speak - I will update from time to time)

"Bypassing the authority of Congress, Barack Obama rules through czars — the beginnings of dictatorship.

Afghanistan-Pakistan (Af-Pak) czar, Richard Holbrooke
AIDS czar, Jeffrey Crowley [openly gay white man]
Auto recovery czar, Ed Montgomery
Behavioral science czar, position not yet filled
Bailout czar, Herbert Allison Jr., [replaced Bush bailout czar Neel Kashkari, Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Financial Stability confirmed by Senate]
Border czar, Alan Bersin
Car czar, Ron Bloom [Counselor to the Secretary of the Treasury , under Senate oversight]
Climate change czar, Todd Stern
Copyright czar, not appointed yet
Counterterrorism czar, John Brennan
Cybersecurity czar, position will be vacant on August 21st [upon the departure of Melissa Hathaway]
Disinformation czar, Linda Douglass [This is a new media buzz since our earlier list, a response by pundits to the White House request for informants: see Glenn Beck and Lew Rockwell]
Domestic violence czar, Lynn Rosenthal
Drug czar, Gil Kerlikowske
Economic czar, Larry Summers
Economic czar number two, Paul Volcker
Education czar, Arne Duncan
Energy czar, Carol Browner
Food czar, Michael Taylor [a former Monsanto executive, or, the fox in charge of the henhouse]
Government performance czar, Jeffrey Zients
Great Lakes czar, Cameron Davis
Green jobs czar, Van Jones [who has a communist background]
Guantanamo closure czar, Daniel Fried
Health czar, Nancy-Ann DeParle
Infotech czar, Vivek Kundra [Shoplifted four shirts, worth $33.50 each, from J.C. Penney in 1996 (source). His last day in DC government was March 4 but on March 12 the FBI raided his office and arrested two staffers.]
Intelligence czar, Dennis Blair [Director of National Intelligence, a Senate confirmed position. He is a retired United States Navy four-star admiral]
Latin-American czar, Arturo Valenzuela (nominee) [although this post is referred to as a czar, he is nominatied to be Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs and so is subject to Senate confirmation. Voting on his confirmation was delayed to clarify his position on Honduras. Watch WaPo’s Head Count to track status of confirmation.]
Mideast peace czar, George Mitchell
Mideast policy czar, Dennis Ross
Pay czar, Kenneth Feinberg
Regulatory czar, Cass Sunstein
Religion czar, aka God czar Joshua DuBois
Safe schools czar, Kevin Jennings [appointed to be Assistant Deputy Secretary of the Office of Safe and Drug-Free Schools, a newly created post (that does not require Senate confirmation); openly gay founder of an organization dedicated to promoting pro-homosexual clubs and curricula in public schools]
Science czar, John Holdren
Stimulus oversight czar, Earl Devaney
Sudan czar, J. Scott Gration
TARP czar, Elizabeth Warren [chair of the [Congressional Oversight Panel for the Trouble Assets Relief Program; note that Herb Allison is frequently called the TARP czar]
Technology czar, Aneesh Chopra
Trade czar, Ron Kirk
Urban affairs czar, Adolfo Carrion
War czar, Douglas Lute [retained from Bush administration, married to Jane Holl Lute, currently a Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security]
Water czar, David J. Hayes [a Deputy Interior Secretary and therefore subject to Senate oversight]
Weapons czar, Ashton Carter [actually Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics and so subject to Senate confirmation]
Weapons of mass destruction czar, Gary Samore
Diversity czar: Mark Lloyd

Positions being planned:
Income redistribution czar
Land-use czar
Mortgage czar, formally “consumer financial protection czar” (source)
Radio-internet fairness czar
Student loan czar, to oversee a program of mandatory service in return for college money (source)
Voter list czar
Zoning czar

Obama has moved swiftly to concentrate power in the White House, bypassing the review of our elected representatives in Congress in most of the posts listed above. Even though cabinet positions are part of the executive branch, the cabinet secretaries must be approved by Congress, they are funded by Congress, and they can be called before Congress to testify. Most of these czars, on the other hand, are appointed by Obama at his sole discretion, and are answerable only to him. If subpoenaed by Congress, they can claim executive privilege.
On July 15, Rep. Jack Kingston (R-GA) introduced H.R.3226, the Czar Accountability and Reform (CZAR) Act of 2009, with 34 co-sponsors. There is some comfort in knowing that there are still a few folk in the House of Representatives who are fighting for constitutional government.

This new list is alphabetized by the czar positions, to facilitate comparison with the excellent research on the duties of each office done by Terresa Monroe-Hamilton at Noisy Room. "

Each Czar has avoided congressional oversight, receives $179,000 annual salary, and a staff of 10 people - and no outrage???

Ted Kennedy RIP

2009-08-26T05:54:00.000-07:00

"Everyone will come, everyone will come, to my funeral to make sure that I stay dead" - Four Rusted Horses, Marilyn Manson

The "liberal lion" passed away (who truly believed that there exists no problem that couldn't be solved by government intervention and lots of money thrown at it), and while conservative passings like Jack Kemp and Strom Thurmond received only passing glances from the media, the Kennedy passing and service will be treated like a royal procession, complete with obligatory sainthood considerations. The real facts about the Honorable(?) Senator, that will never be mentioned in the mainstream media, from our friends at NNDB:

"Ted Kennedy held his Senate seat for more than four decades. He authored or argued for legislation that ensured a variety of civil rights, increased the minimum wage in 1981, made access to health care easier for the indigent, and funded Meals on Wheels for fixed-income seniors. His other successes include reducing the voting age from 21 to 18, and Title IX, which gave women's athletics much better funding. Widely held as the "standard-bearer for liberalism", his legacy is that his era has been dominated by conservatives (Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush) and moderates (Jimmy Carter, George H.W. Bush, and Bill Clinton).
Kennedy earned C grades at the private Milton Academy, but was admitted to Harvard as a "legacy" -- his father and older brothers had attended there, so the younger and dimmer Kennedy's admission was virtually assured. While attending, he was expelled twice, once for cheating on a test, and once for paying a classmate to cheat for him. While expelled, Kennedy enlisted in the Army, but mistakenly signed up for four years instead of two. His father, Joseph P. Kennedy, former U.S. Ambassador to England, pulled the necessary strings to have his enlistment shortened to two years, and to ensure that he served in Europe, not Korea, where a war was raging. Kennedy was assigned to Paris, never advanced beyond the rank of Private, and returned to Harvard upon being discharged.
While attending law school at the University of Virginia, he was cited for reckless driving four times, including once when he was clocked driving 90 miles per hour in a residential neighborhood with his headlights off after dark. Yet his Virginia driver's license was never revoked. He passed the bar exam in 1959, and two years later was appointed an Assistant to the District Attorney in Massachusetts' Suffolk County.
In 1962, at age 30 (constitutionally, the minimum age to hold a Senate seat) he ran for the Senate. His timing was perfect -- his brother John had given up the seat to become President, and Kennedy easily won the office. He was re-elected eight times to the office.
In 1964, he was seriously injured in a plane crash, and hospitalized for several months. His sister Kathleen and nephew "John John" were killed in separate plane crashes.
On 19 July 1969, Kennedy attended a party on Chappaquiddick Island in Massachusetts. At about 11:00 PM, he borrowed his chauffeur's keys to his Oldsmobile limousine, and offered to give a ride home to Mary Jo Kopechne, a campaign worker. Leaving the island via an unlit bridge with no guard rail, Kennedy steered the car off the bridge, flipped, and into Poucha Pond. He swam to shore and walked back to the party -- passing several houses and a fire station -- and two friends returned with him to the scene of the accident. According to their later testimony, they told him what he already knew, that he was required by law to immediately report the accident to the authorities. Instead Kennedy made his way to his hotel, called his lawyer, and went to sleep.
Kennedy called the police the next morning. By then the wreck had already been discovered. Before dying, Kopechne had scratched at the upholstered floor above her head in the upside-down car. The Kennedy family began pulling strings, ensuring that any inquiry would be contained. Her corpse was whisked out-of-state to her family, before an autopsy could be conducted. Further details are uncertain, but after the accident Kennedy says he repeatedly dove under the water trying to rescue Kopechne, and he didn't call police because he was in a state of shock. In versions not so kind, it is widely assumed Kennedy was drunk, that he was having an affair with Kopechne, and/or that he held off calling police in hopes that his family could fix the problem overnight.
Since the accident, Kennedy's political enemies have referred to him as the distinguished Senator from Chappaquiddick, or worse. He pled guilty to leaving the scene of an accident, and was given a suspended sentence of two months. Kopechne's family received a small payout from the Kennedy's insurance policy, and never sued. There was later an effort to have her body exhumed and autopsied, but her family successfully fought against this in court, and Kennedy's family paid their attorney's bills.
In 1973, at the height of Nixon's Watergate scandal, Kennedy thundered from the Senate floor, "Do we operate under a system of equal justice under law? Or is there one system for the average citizen and another for the high and mighty?"
In 1980, Kennedy challenged Carter, his own party's sitting President, for the Democratic nomination. Kennedy's bid was hampered by questions of Chappaquiddick and by an interview with CBS Newsman Roger Mudd, who asked the straightforward question, "Why do you want to be President?" Kennedy couldn't come up with a straightforward answer. Carter was nominated for re-election, but the party's divisions contributed to the victory won by Reagan.
In a late-1980s media profile, Kennedy was succinctly described as someone who "grew to manhood without learning to be an adult". He is rumored to have had several affairs while married to his first wife, and had often been seen in public while thoroughly tanked and/or behaving obnoxiously. In 1987 he was caught in flagrante delicto with an unidentified woman on the floor of a restaurant. His public image since the early 1990s and during his second marriage has been more conservative and restrained.
In 2001, Kennedy worked with President Bush to enact the No Child Left Behind Act. He later complained publicly that he had been hoodwinked, because the legislation did not include funding to pay for its requirements.
Kennedy voted against the Iraq war, and in 2003, Kennedy said of it: "There was no imminent threat. This was made up in Texas, announced in January to the Republican leadership that war was going to take place and was going to be good politically. This whole thing was a fraud." - NNDB

If you want to know what Ted Kennedy was really like, in a nutshell, look at the comments he made during the Robert Bork (who could run legal circles around any of the members of the Senate) Supreme Court hearing:

"Robert Bork's America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens' doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists could be censored at the whim of the Government, and the doors of the Federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens for whom the judiciary is -- and is often the only -- protector of the individual rights that are the heart of our democracy...." ....
"President Reagan is still our president. But he should not be able to reach out from the muck of Irangate, reach into the muck of Watergate and impose his reactionary vision of the Constitution on the Supreme Court and the next generation of American. No justice would be better than this injustice". Absolutely disgusting - this from a man who's supposedly a people's champion, denegrating a defender of the Constitution - unreal!

And finally, when endorsing Barack Obama with the entire liberal political machine in Mass., Barack still lost to Hillary Clinton in the primaries. And more recently, he tried to have the rules changed for succession of office of Senator, so a democrat could be appointed immediately, after being one of the leaders to set up the first change (during Senator Kerry's run for President), so a governor Mitt Romney could not choose a republican, if Kerry had won the Presidency and vacated the Senate post. And of course, now the other Senators and Representatives are trying to rally around him "Do it for Ted," as they try to ram the health care plan down our throats - not even a moment out of respect for the deceased, he's used politically in the same breadth - though that makes sense, since everything he did had a political calculation - almost makes you wonder if this was timed, while he was receiving every possible treatment, that wouldn't be afforded to anyone else in this country, while the plan looked like it was on it's last legs.

Truly, he carries the title of "Liberal Lion," (never seeing a law he couldn't change to his, and his party's benefit) to the very end.

Dumb and Dumber

2009-08-25T11:59:00.000-07:00

This just in - Obama is not letting the rats jump ship off the U.S. Titanic, as he's re-appointed Bernanke to another term - during his long-deserved vacation (after all, he's been in office a whole seven months - lots of heavy lifting, spending Trillions placed on the backs of our children and grandchildren). If Greenspan and Bernanke aren't two excellent examples as to why we need to end the Federal Reserve now!

Playing God in Washington

2009-08-25T11:43:00.001-07:00

Thomas Sowell is one of my favorite thinkers and writers, so I give my post to his latest article from www.realclearpolitics.com :

"August 24, 2009
A New Push to Play God from WashingtonBy Thomas Sowell

The serious, and sometimes chilling, provisions of the medical care legislation that President Obama has been trying to rush through Congress are important enough for all of us to stop and think, even though his political strategy from the outset has been to prevent us from having time to stop and think about it.
What we also should stop to think about is the mindset behind this legislation, which is very consistent with the mindset behind other policies of this administration, whether the particular issue is bailing out General Motors, telling banks who to lend to or appointing "czars" to tell all sorts of people in many walks of life what they can and cannot do.
The idea that government officials can play God from Washington is not a new idea, but it is an idea that is being pushed with new audacity.
What they are trying to do is to create an America very unlike the America that has existed for centuries-- the America that people have been attracted to by the millions from every part of the world, the America that many generations of Americans have fought and died for.
This is the America for which Michelle Obama expressed her resentment before it became politically expedient to keep quiet.
It is the America that Reverend Jeremiah Wright denounced in his sermons during the 20 years when Barack Obama was a parishioner, before political expediency required Obama to withdraw and distance himself.
The thing most associated with America-- freedom-- is precisely what must be destroyed if this is to be turned into a fundamentally different country to suit Obama's vision of the country and of himself. But do not expect a savvy politician like Barack Obama to express what he is doing in terms of limiting our freedom.
He may not even think of it in those terms. He may think of it in terms of promoting "social justice" or making better decisions than ordinary people are capable of making for themselves, whether about medical care or housing or many other things. Throughout history, egalitarians have been among the most arrogant people.
Obama has surrounded himself with people who also think it is their job to make other people's decisions for them. Not just Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, his health care advisor who complains of Americans' "over-utilization" of medical care, but also Professor Cass Sunstein, who has written a whole book on how third parties should use government power to "nudge" people into making better decisions in general.
Then there are a whole array of Obama administration officials who take it as their job to pick winners and losers in the economy and tell companies how much they can and cannot pay their executives.
Just as magicians know that the secret of some of their tricks is to distract the audience, so politicians know that the secret of many political tricks is to distract the public with scapegoats.
No one is more of a political magician than Barack Obama. At the beginning of 2008, no one expected a shrewd and experienced politician like Hillary Clinton to be beaten for the Democratic nomination for President of the United States by someone completely new to the national political scene. But Obama worked his political magic, with the help of the media, which he still has.
Barack Obama's escapes from his own past words, deeds and associations have been escapes worthy of Houdini.
Like other magicians, Obama has chosen his distractions well. The insurance industry is currently his favorite distraction as scapegoats, after he has tried to demonize doctors without much success.
Saints are no more common in the insurance industry than in politics or even among paragons of virtue like economists. So there will always be horror stories, even if these are less numerous or less horrible than what is likely to happen if Obamacare gets passed into law.
Obama even gets away with saying things like having a system to "keep insurance companies honest"-- and many people may not see the painful irony in politicians trying to keep other people honest. Certainly most of the media are unlikely to point out this irony.
Copyright 2009, Creators Syndicate Inc.

E-Mail Gate Solved!

2009-08-23T07:58:00.000-07:00

With the battle for Health Care reform continuing, the White House has full-pressed the process, after they failed to get it through in two weeks, so they wouldn't have to actually answer for any of this - from another front the White House denied the existence of unsolicited e-mails, so let's take a look at the chronology (again, imagine how the past administration would have been vilified by the media if they had done any of this) - and of course, during all of this, at the height of the health care battle, Obama is on another vacation (again, insert Bush, and watch the media all over this - but now, not a word) - while he still declares that this plan with be deficit neutral, which as an economist, I'll be happy to demonstrate this will be impossible without rationing, which he claims will not happen - come on people, stop drinking the Kool-Aid:

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/08/14/white-house-expected-explain-creation-health-care-e-mail-list/
"FOX News has offered the White House examples of what hundreds of people say were unsolicited e-mails on health care, Barack Obama's presidential campaign or his political organization, Organizing for America, but spokesman Robert Gibbs has declined to respond.
The offer comes after a testy exchange on Thursday between correspondent Major Garrett and Gibbs over the e-mail list.
Gibbs told Garrett on Thursday that he couldn't respond until he saw who received the e-mail because he doesn't have "omnipotent clarity."
Asked whether the White House seeks other pieces of information to identify those who might be curious about health care even though they have never signed up for e-mails or visited the Web site, Gibbs said he would have to see the e-mails to know."

Then of course, the White House again, blames "sinister" outside forces:

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/08/18/white-house-blames-e-mail-controversy-sinister-conspiracy-theories/

"The White House is blaming the controversy over its Web site and mass e-mails on viral rumors, "fear-mongering" and "sinister conspiracy theories" even as it acknowledges problems with its online practices.
After confirming to FOX News over the weekend that third-party groups could be responsible for official White House e-mails that have been sent to people who never signed up for them, President Obama's new media director took to the official White House blog to "clear up" the confusion.
In a posting Monday night, Macon Phillips again pointed the finger at "outside groups of all political stripes" but downplayed the backlash over the unwanted e-mails."

And now, the While House realizes that they did contract with a firm to send out these e-mails - again, amazing:

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/08/22/white-house-reveals-identity-firm-sent-unsolicited-e-mails-health-reform/

"The White House hired a private communications company based in Minnesota to distribute mass e-mails, helping to shed light on how some recipients received e-mails in support of President Obama's health care plan without signing up for them, FOX News has learned.
The company, Govdelivery, describes itself as the world's leading provider of government-to-citizen communication solutions and says its e-mail service provides a fully-automated on-demand public communication system.
It is still unknown how much taxpayer money the White House provides to Govdelivery for its services.
Click here to view Govdelivery's Web site.
The revelation comes after the White House acknowledged this week that people were receiving unsolicited e-mails from the administration about health care reform and suggested the problem was with third-party groups that placed the recipients' names on the distribution list."

Daschle to the Rescue (From the New York Times, believe it or not!)

2009-08-23T07:29:00.000-07:00

Truly amazing - after Daschle was "disgraced" into removing his name for consideration in one of the choicest crony positions with Our Furious leader (but only with Republicans and anyone who disagrees with him - coming up on 55% at last count - luckily the man who is swept into office with majorities in the House and Senate stands up for his convictions(?) and says a Republican conspiracy has caused health care to stall - is he kidding? - back to Daschle) - of course Daschle has been making a bundle of money -make sure you file your taxes this time - try that Turbo Tax idea that Geithner ignored as well - and the main stream media looks the other way - and he gets an audience in the Whitehouse, but says there is no conflict speaking to the man who promised this wouldn't be business as usual, though as we can see, it is politics as usual - I have to quote the New York Times in it's entirety, highlighting the amazing parts, knowing the American public is a lot brighter than Bill Maher gives them credit for (though most who voted did vote for Obama, so who knows) - and luckily the mainstream media continues covering the 2004 election, or issues off the grid, while Rome burns - again, amazing - could you have imagined if Bush had tried to get away with any of this, the media would have screamed from the rooftops, including Obama's disgusting deals with AARP, big Pharma and AMA - Don't know about you, but I'm ashamed at how this entire Executive branch and their lackies in the congress as well as their lobbyists are destroying our system - while blaming the other side, since they seem to be too inept to automatically get every governmental control through - sorry Comrades:

"August 23, 2009
Daschle Has Ear of White House and Industry
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK
WASHINGTON — Six months have passed since the morning when Tom Daschle, the former Senate Democratic leader, under fire for not paying certain taxes, called President Obama in his study off the Oval Office to withdraw his nomination as health secretary and reform czar.
But these days it often seems as if Mr. Daschle never left the picture. With unrivaled ties on both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue, he talks constantly with top White House advisers, many of whom previously worked for him.
He still speaks frequently to the president, who met with him as recently as Friday morning in the Oval Office. And he remains a highly paid policy adviser to hospital, drug, pharmaceutical and other health care industry clients of Alston & Bird, the law and lobbying firm.
Now the White House and Senate Democratic leaders appear to be moving toward a blueprint for overhauling the health system, centered on nonprofit insurance cooperatives, that Mr. Daschle began promoting two months ago as a politically feasible alternative to a more muscular government-run insurance plan.
It is an idea that happens to dovetail with the interests of many Alston & Bird clients, like the insurance giant UnitedHealth and the Tennessee Hospital Association. And it is drawing angry cries of accommodation from more liberal House Democrats bent on including a public insurance plan.
Friends and associates of Mr. Daschle say the interests of Alston & Bird’s clients have no influence on his views. They say he sees no conflict in advising private clients on the one hand and advising the White House on the other, because he offers the same assessment to everyone: Though he has often said that he favors a government-run insurance option, the Senate will not pass it.
“The message I deliver to labor unions and business leaders is the same one I share with doctors, hospitals and insurance companies,” Mr. Daschle wrote in a brief e-mailed statement. “I do not tailor my views to any specific group or client.”
Mr. Daschle is not registered as a lobbyist and recently told U.S. News and World Report that he preferred to describe himself as a “resource” to those in government and industry.
“I’d like to be a resource to my former colleagues, to the extent that I can, to the administration, to the stakeholders and to people interested in just kind of knowing how this is all going to play out,” he said. “I am most comfortable with the word resource.”
White House officials say they appreciate his help. “He is one of a number of people that provides outside advice to the White House, and the president greatly appreciates that advice and Tom’s friendship,” said Dan Pfeiffer, a spokesman for the White House who previously worked for Mr. Daschle. Mr. Pfeiffer added that the former senator was “a recognized expert on health reform who knows more about the legislative process than just about anyone.”
Critics, though, say his ex officio role gives Alston & Bird’s health care clients privileged insights into the policy process. They say Mr. Daschle’s multiple advisory roles illustrate the kind of coziness with the lobbying world that Mr. Obama vowed to end. If he had been confirmed as health secretary, Mr. Daschle would have been subject to strict transparency and ethics rules.
His position, some liberals say, raises at least an appearance of a conflict of interest. “I hope the president can make a decision based on what the country wants, not what a handful of Daschle’s clients want,” said Representative Lynn Woolsey of California, a leader of the progressive caucus.
Clients of Alston & Bird say Mr. Daschle advises them, sometimes indirectly through the firm’s registered lobbyists, about the personalities of his former colleagues, as well as strategies to achieve their policy goals.
“He would tell us, ‘Make sure you present the value proposition of home care with as great detail as you can, so Congress understands that home care is part of the solution rather than a cost to be cut,’ ” said William A. Dombi, a lawyer at the National Association for Home Care and Hospice.
Some of the health overhaul bills would make deep cuts in Medicare payments for home health services, but Mr. Daschle has instead argued for an increase. And though he does not lobby, he took that message to Capitol Hill last month, giving a paid speech at a meeting for Congressional staff convened by a group of home health care equipment concerns.
“My mother’s quality of life is a hundred times better given the fact that she can live at home rather than be institutionalized at 86,” Mr. Daschle told the audience, according to industry newsletters.
Representative Jason Altmire, a Pennsylvania Democrat who spoke alongside Mr. Daschle, praised the former senator but said it was inevitable that his dual roles would draw criticism, especially “given the high profile this president has given to trying to show some distance from the lobbying business.”
Mr. Altmire added, “That makes it even more difficult for him to be involved.”
Mr. Daschle does not shrink from his leading role in the debate. Speaking at a hospital industry conference last week, for example, he accepted billing as “the architect of President Obama’s health care plan.”
Before such industry groups, Mr. Daschle can sometimes cheer on their lobbying efforts, as he did at a meeting on Aug. 8 of chain drugstore executives when he urged them to push lawmakers to raise certain Medicaid reimbursements.
“This is a message that I hope each and every one of you will take to your member of Congress,” he said. “There is no more critical time to do that.”
He both recommends and predicts an incremental approach.
“We are not going to see this happen overnight,” Mr. Daschle told a biotechnology trade group in May. “It can’t. It is too big a shift in the economy.” If the legislation can begin to “ramp up” coverage for all, health information technology and some cost controls, he said, “we will have succeeded.”
He often enumerates what he considers areas of political momentum as well as points of disagreement, including the government insurance plan. “There is no consensus on whether there ought to be a public option,” he told the drugstore executives.
Last week he told the hospital executives, “There is virtually no support among Republican members for a public option, and that remains an unresolved element of this debate.”
Senate Democratic leaders have recently said they concur it is unlikely to pass.
Mr. Daschle’s friendship with the president goes back to Mr. Obama’s first days in the Senate. An early and important backer of Mr. Obama’s presidential campaign, Mr. Daschle also sent a steady stream of former aides to Mr. Obama’s Senate office and White House staff. Mr. Obama’s senior adviser Pete Rouse was Mr. Daschle’s chief of staff. Jeanne Lambrew, a top White House adviser on health care reform, was a co-author of Mr. Daschle’s 2008 book, “Critical: What We Can Do About the Healthcare Crisis.”
Mr. Daschle’s cabinet nomination was done in by the disclosure that he had failed to pay taxes on the use of a friend’s car and driver while making millions advising Alston & Bird’s clients. After he withdrew his nomination, he threw himself into preparing a bipartisan proposal for health care overhaul with two former Republican Senate leaders: Bob Dole, a colleague at Alston & Bird, and Howard H. Baker Jr., now at another law and lobbying firm. Their proposal, released in June, was among the first to spell out the idea of helping states establish health insurance “co-op plans with consumer boards.”
Senator Kent Conrad, Democrat of North Dakota and one of Mr. Daschle’s closest friends, began pitching the idea at about the same time and has become its champion. Mr. Conrad is among six members of the Senate Finance Committee working on their own compromise proposal that aides say looks increasingly like the Daschle-Dole-Baker report.
As a backstop, their plan provided that if state co-ops or other programs failed to meet certain cost and coverage goals in five years, the president could create a public plan on a fast track without threat of a Senate filibuster.
That feature, known as a trigger, was briefly acknowledged as another possible compromise by the White House chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel. Though it was little discussed, Senator Olympia J. Snowe, Republican of Maine and one of the Finance Committee’s group of six, has recently expressed support for the concept, and committee aides say the idea is under consideration.
To address doctors’ fears of lawsuits, Mr. Daschle and his collaborators proposed a “safe harbor” from legal liability for doctors who follow certain rules. Mr. Obama took up the idea in a mid-June speech to the American Medical Association.
After Mr. Daschle left the Oval Office on Friday, a White House spokesman described their meeting as a “quick check-in” on the overhaul process. The spokesman said the two “agreed to stay in touch over the coming weeks and months.”

Humor in Humorless Society

2009-08-22T08:11:00.001-07:00

From Ron Paul: The Free Market as Regulator, Not the Government

2009-08-21T06:39:00.000-07:00

From Campaign for Liberty's Dr. Ron Paul (U.S. Representative - Texas and Presidential Candidate - Libertarian and Republican) - I recommend joining the organization to get the latest updates, though I'll try to post the latest news each Friday:

"Since the bailouts last fall, lawmakers have been behaving as quasi-owners of the bailed-out banks and businesses, leading to calls for increased regulation of executive compensation and other wasteful expenditures. We have heard much about bonuses and executive pay packages that sound more like lottery winnings than an honest salary. Many lawmakers voted in favor of these unconstitutional bailouts, believing that these corporations were too big to fail, and allowing them to go under would precipitate widespread economic disaster. This second wave of citizen outrage at the bailouts has left these lawmakers with a bit of egg on their face, and once again, they feel the need to "do something" to "fix" it. Shouldn't there be a regulatory structure in place governing executive compensation? Politically, it seems quite feasible. People are outraged that the system has once again gutted the many to make a few at the top fantastically wealthy. But they are incorrectly demonizing the free market. What we need to realize is that there WAS a regulatory structure in place that was attempting to stop bad management, including overpaying executives. That regulatory structure is the free market, and when poor management brought these companies to the point of bankruptcy, Congress circumvented the wisdom of the free market, and inserted its own judgment at our expense. And now because of that intervention, we will burdened with massive new regulations. We can be certain this effort will fail. The free market is a naturally occurring phenomenon that can't be eliminated by governments, not even totalitarian ones like the former Soviet Union. It can be regulated, over-taxed and manipulated until it is driven underground. Lately it has been wrongly accused of doing so many things it just doesn't do, that are really the fault of crony corporatism and convoluted government policies that brought on the crisis. Too many people equate the free market with big business doing whatever it wants, but that is not the free market. Unconstitutional taxpayer funded bailouts are what allow giant corporations to run roughshod over the economy. The free market is what puts them out of business when they misbehave. The free market is you and your neighbors working hard to produce what you produce, and exchanging goods and services voluntarily, in mutually agreeable arrangements. The free market is about respecting property rights and contracts. It is not about building up oligarchs and monopolies and confiscatory tax theft -- these are creatures of government. We must watch out when government comes up with interventionist solutions to interventionist problems. The root of our problems lie in interventionism. Trusting the free market is the solution."

Another Reason Against Health Care Reform: Look at Social Security

2009-08-20T17:43:00.000-07:00

Had this passed on by a fellow patriot...

Does this surprise you? The Truth About Social Security (and we have Health Care Reform to look forward to, by the same group)

Franklin D. Roosevelt - 32nd. President, Democrat - Terms of Office March 4, 1933, to April 12, 1945

Introduced the Social Security (FICA) Program. He promised: 1.) That participation in the Program would be completely voluntary, 2.) That the participants would only have to pay 1% of the first $1,400 of their annual Incomes into the Program, 3.) That the money the participants elected to put Into the Program would be deductible from Their income for tax purposes each year, 4.) That the money the participants put into the Independent 'Trust Fund' rather than into the General operating fund, and therefore, would Only be used to fund the Social Security Retirement Program, and no other Government program, and 5.) That the annuity payments to the retirees would never be taxed as income. Since many of us have paid into FICA for years and are now receiving a Social Security check every month -- and then finding that we are getting taxed on 85% of the money we paid to the Federal government to be 'Put Away' -- you may be interested in the following:

Dwight D Eisenhower - 34th. President, Republican, - Term Of Office: January 20, 1953 to January 20, 1961.

1958 is the first year that Congress, not President Eisenhower, voted to remove funds from Social Security and put it into the General Fund for Congress to spend - a democratically controlled Congress. Congress' logic at that time was that there was so much money in Social Security Fund that it would never run out/be used up for the purpose it was intended/set aside for.

Lyndon B Johnson - 36th. President, Democrat - Term Of Office: November 22, 1963 to January 20, 1969

Question: Which Political Party took Social Security from the Independent 'Trust Fund' and put it into the General Fund so that Congress could spend it? Answer: It was Lyndon B. Johnson and the democratically Controlled House and Senate.

James Earl Carter, Jr (Jimmy Carter) - 39th. President, Democrat - Term of Office: January 20, 1977 to January 20, 1981

Question: Which Political Party decided to start giving Annuity payments to immigrants? ANSWER: That's right! JAMES EARL CARTER, JR. (JIMMY CARTER) AND THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY. IMMIGRANTS MOVED INTO THIS COUNTRY, AND AT AGE 65, BEGAN TO RECEIVE SOCIAL SECURITY PAYMENTS: THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY GAVETHESE PAYMENTS TO THEM, EVEN THOUGH THEY NEVER PAID A DIME INTO IT!

AND CONGRESS GIVES THEMSELVES 100% RETIREMENT FOR ONLY SERVING ONE TERM ! ! !

Question: Which Political Party eliminated the income tax Deduction for Social Security (FICA) withholding? - Answer: The Democratic Party.

William Jefferson Clinton (Bill Clinton) - 42nd. President - Democrat Term of Office: January 20, 1993 to January 20, 2001 and Albert Arnold Gore, Jr. (Al Gore) - 45th. Vice President

Democrat Term of Office: January 20, 1993 to January 20, 2001 - Question: Which Political Party started taxing Social Security annuities? - Answer: The Democratic Party, with Albert Arnold Gore, Jr. (Al Gore) [Vice President Term of Office: January 10, 1993 to January 20, 2001] casting the 'tie-breaking' deciding vote as President of the Senate, while he was Vice President of the US.

Then, after violating the original contract (FICA), the Democrats turn around and tell you that the Republicans want to take your Social Security away! And the worst part about it is uninformed citizens believe it! If enough people receive this, maybe a seed of Awareness will be planted and maybe changes WILL evolve. Maybe not, some Democrats are awfully sure of what isn't so. But it's worth a try. Actions speak louder than bumper stickers.

It's probably said best by Thomas Jefferson - 3rd. President, Democrat (but truly our first Libertarian in office) - Term of Office: January 20, 1777 to January 20, 1781 - "A government big enough to give you everything you want, is strong enough to take everything you have."

When was the Death of Capitalism?

2009-08-18T09:52:00.000-07:00

Professor Joseph Olson of Hamline University School of Law, St. Paul, Minnesota, points out some interesting facts concerning last Novemberâ€™s Presidential election:
Number of States won by: Democrats: 19 Republicans: 29
Square miles of land won by: Democrats: 580,000 Republicans: 2,427,000
Population of counties won by: Democrats: 127 million Republicans: 143 million
Murder rate per 100,000 residents in counties won by: Democrats: 13.2 Republicans: 2.1
Professor Olson adds: "In aggregate, the map of the territory Republicans won was mostly the land owned by the taxpaying citizens of the country. Democrat territory mostly encompassed those citizens living in low income tenements and living off various forms of government welfare..."
Olson believes the United States is now somewhere between the "complacency and apathy" phase of Professor Tyler's definition of democracy, with some forty percent of the nation's population already having reached the "governmental dependency" phase.
If Congress grants amnesty and citizenship to twenty million criminal invaders called illegals and they vote, then we can say goodbye to the USA in fewer than five years. If you are in favor of this, then by all means, ignore this post. If you are not, then pass this post, and website along to help everyone realize just how much is at stake, knowing that apathy is the greatest danger to our freedom.

Newt and Nugent? - Has a Nice Ring to It!

2009-08-16T11:45:00.001-07:00

Reading a posting from our favorite Libertarian madman, Ted Nugent in Human Events, August 4, who laments over Michigan's demise (while the democratic Governor Granholm plays the violin):

"My beloved home state of Michigan is snagged in an ugly and self-imposed economic and social snare.
Michigan is on economic life support. With unemployment already hovering at fifteen percent and with the automotive industry going the way of the Dodo bird, the bad times for Michigan may have just begun. Michiganiacs beware: things could get much uglier for the Wolverine state before it gets better.
The automotive industry, the foundation of Michigan, and dare I say America, is bankrupt and dying. Taxpayer bailouts, loans to the poorly managed and union controlled car companies, and even a $4,500.00 taxpayer subsidy for people who trade in their older cars for fuel efficient cars may only be postponing the inevitable. Death may be on the doorstep of my old hunting grounds in Dearborn.
According to a July 6 University of Michigan economic article, Michigan will lose over 300,000 jobs from end of 2008 to the end of 2009. The Detroit Free Press reported on July 21 the average sale price for a home in Detroit is a paltry $6,500.00.
If that news isn’t bad enough, I read an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal that Detroit’s poorly run and union-controlled public schools are expected to file for bankruptcy protection any day now. According to that op-ed, only one out of four children who enter the ninth grade graduate on time, the proficiency scores of kids in the Detroit public school system are dismal compared to other Michigan school systems while the Detroit school system spends $1,700 more per student than other Michigan school systems. The Detroit public school system is not just the worst in Michigan, but the worst in the nation. Nice going NEA. " - Ted Nugent

Say what you want about Ted, but he always stands up for what he believes with such a common sense approach, a true rarity these days. It truly is a shame that a once and vital state like Michigan will soon be reduced to (even more) federal government handouts, with the possibility of IOUs a la California coming down the pike - but soon we'll have the terrorists that nobody wants - and Obama will fulfill another questionable promise technically - I can see it now "Well, they're out of Gitmo, aren't they?" - maybe they could stay at his home in Illinois that he was able to purchase in that sweetheart real estate deal that you and I would never have been able to do (we're too honest - not community organizers with connections - work too hard to try to work all the angles - your choice) - though Obama does have experience working close up with terrorists (you have to belive Bill Ayres will be appointed to something here - he's getting enough money from the government as it is)

Terrible Ted then mentions Newt Gingrich's plan from the American Solutions site:

"Newt Gingrich and his America Solutions organization have it right if we truly want to jump start the economy and set forth the conditions to create good, permanent jobs.
1. Cut taxes 50% for individuals and businesses. Putting this extra cash in the hands of people and small businesses would ignite the American economy like pouring gas on a fire. Barry O and crew are doing everything they can to pour gallons of water on already dwindling embers of capitalism.
2. Eliminate the Capital Gains tax. Newt argues this will provide the capital to build new factories, enable entrepreneurs to start new businesses, create new technologies, etc. History shows that his arguments are bullet proof.
3. Drastically slim down the corporate tax rate, which is among the highest in the world. Reducing our corporate tax rate to that of Ireland (12.5%) would make America a magnet for new companies which would hire American workers.
4. Kill the Death Tax. Taxing the after tax savings of Americans is immoral, mob-like behavior. Killing the death tax would unleash hundreds of billions of dollars that Americans could use to start new businesses and hire Americans.
Newt and his American Solutions ideas to get Michigan and America moving again are spot-on. Barry O and his hyperliberal school boy crew are dead wrong. Americans are paying the price for Barry O’s anti-freedom, anti-capitalist, and very anti-American economic policies. " - Ted Nugent, c/o Newt Gingrich

All sound economic ideas (and you can say what you want about Newt - but he gets the job done, look at Contract with America - what was impressive was not just the proposal in a very simple format for all to understand, but to actually complete the contract as well - so very rare in politics), which means they haven't got a chance as long as the current group is in office - but we have to believe that the American people will rise, released from their chains, if they haven't already been placed around the neck of the free market system - we have to believe there's time, but it's running out. Get involved, and look carefully at the Libertarian ideas, which each of these points made, will get us out of this mess (would have kept us from this mess in the first place) - it's so simple, and perhaps that's where people have trouble understanding the premise, as they have been ingrained to believe that programs are not what they say they are (especially when delivered by politicians in Washington DC, or each of the state houses) and they are starting to look to see who's behind the curtain pulling the strings - read "1984" - George Orwell, "Atlas Shrugged" - Ayn Rand, "It can't Happen Here" - Sinclair Lewis, and "Revolution" - Ron Paul and stand up - and speak up (articulate and loud - the other side seems to hate that).

An excellent video with Ted discussing Freedom(and actually having to defend his rights - amazing that he has to do that in this country, still???):

The Death of Obama Care?

2009-08-16T06:10:00.000-07:00

Is it possible? Obama Care in it's current form, is truly faltering? Yes, I know something will have to be passed for Obama to save face - though "talking out of both sides of his...." could make that challenging. Three basic pieces of evidence, as possible microcosms of a much bigger picture that will not be completed in Obama's image (just had a flashback to the great book and movie "The Picture of Dorian Gray" but in this case, Obama will still be idolized and still represent that "ideal" to his loyal subjects, while the overall picture is becoming something rather ugly indeed):

1. The liberal columnists and bloggers are starting to look at this plan, and ignoring the Whitehouse's suggestion, to look "at the big picture," they are finding much fault with the plan, even to the point of, "gasp," believing that the critics "may be right."

Examples such as some of the dirt being dug up by those "conservative - re: just kidding, really leftest websites" such as the Daily Kos and Huffington Post - excellent examples of how some species do eat their young. Case in point, from the Daily Beast, an interesting post by Lee Siegel, titled "Obama's Euthanasia Mistake," which takes to task Obama's nearly non-emotional tenor of bill and tack of campaigning over areas that could be quite emotional to the participants who actually have to make the decisions over life-and-death, particularly that all life is precious and cannot be rationalized... a couple key sections in the piece to consider - the "life-sustaining committees," though the term "death panels," seems to be getting more mileage in the press:

"...One of the key ideas under consideration—which can be read as expressing sympathy for limitations on end-of-life care—is morally revolting. And it’s helping to kill the plan itself.

Make no mistake about it. Determining which treatments are “cost effective” at the end of a person’s life and which are not is one of Obama’s priorities. It’s one of the principal ways he counts on saving money and making universal healthcare affordable.

This is the Big Brother nightmare of oppressive government that the shrewd propagandists on the right are always blathering on about. Except that this time, they could not be more right.

Obama told Diane Sawyer in June that government should “study and figure out what works and what doesn’t. And let’s encourage doctors and patients to get what works. Let’s discourage what doesn’t.”

Sawyer then asked him: “Will it just be encouragement? Or will there be a board making Solomonic decisions?”

Obama replied, “What I’ve suggested is—is that we have a—a commission that helps—made up of doctors, made up of experts, that helps set best—best practices.”

When Sawyer pressed him to say whether those practices would be enforced by law, he evaded the question.

This reeks of the Big Brother nightmare of oppressive government that the shrewd propagandists on the right are always blathering on about. Except that this time, they could not be more right.

Leave aside the argument for ending life when its prospects for continuing seem too painful or too hopeless. Leave it aside because this is one case where Kant’s beautiful categorical imperative—act as though your particular deeds should be a universal law—will never apply. We know that theft and murder are wrong because if they were universally committed, the world would explode in chaos. But the decision to end your life before nature wrenches it away is as rational and humane as the decision to prolong your life by whatever means necessary. Life is too specifically precious to turn its final phase into any type of universal practice, whether it’s enforced by custom or by law.

As for the argument that fruitless tests and “senseless” procedures are bankrupting the health-care system, that is an insult to the intelligence. No one knows which tests and procedures will be effective beforehand. No amount of “study” and research is going to address the particular case and the particular condition, let alone the particular, desperate, irrational will to live—which, in animal terms, is pragmatic and rational...."

Unfortunately, Obama is not getting it, though I believe while he considers himself pragmatic and rational, with such an emotional issue of life-and-death (and many others listed in the plan), that just doesn't cut it.

2. The polls are in the tank

Is it possible that the reason Obama and the Democratic leadership wanted to push this program through, without even reading it, while attacking anyone who had any questions on it at all, is that they knew once people started reading the bill, they wouldn't like what they see??? (Health Care? sounds good, wait a minute, this isn't health care, it's....screams fill the air, the screen turns black, film credits roll - left to your imagination, like a dream, though it's a nightmare, that you will not soon wake up from)... and so the numbers continue to drop, particularly independents...

"The Marist Poll found 45% of registered voters nationwide disapprove of how Obama is handling health care, while 43% approve and 12% are unsure.

A full 52% of independent voters, the critical voting bloc that propelled Obama to the White House last fall, gave the President’s handling of health care the thumbs down, while just 34% approve." (From the New York Daily News, August 14th)

3. Ah, and finally, cable news, what would we do without you?

Though sometimes, I'll admit it, I like to turn the TV and computer off to find out. Amazing how shrill some of these liberal experts are - by shouting down the opponent, seems to give them the impression that they've won [i.e., Chris Matthews, Keith Olberman, Rachel Maddow, and the entire MSNBC crew - it must be like NASCAR (though they wouldn't lower themselves to watch), where all the participants are constantly turning to the left] - such as the following exchange on MSNBC (again, from Daily Beast) - it's pure poetry:

John Mackey, a True Libertarian!

2009-08-15T19:04:00.000-07:00

John Mackey, Co-Founder and CEO had an excellent Op-Ed piece in the Wall Street Journal, August 12th below. He presents a realistic and responsible health care program THAT IS ACTUALLY BEING IMPLEMENTED compared to the "pie-in-the-sky" proposal by our esteemed President. Read carefully - it makes sense, which needless to say, is leading the same confused individuals who believe everything Obama says, as well as believe they are the only ones who shop at Whole Foods, and are now planning boycotts and wanting him to resign (amazing how "tolerant" the left is with individuals they don't agree with - he's the Co-founder, creating an incredible store and concept, why would he resign?). It's simple process of voluntary exchange - no one is forcing anyone to buy from Whole Foods - if you don't wish to shop anywhere, nor are you forced to work anywhere or do anything you don't wish to, you don't have to (at least until Obama plugs that "whole"). Whole Foods is actually one of my favorite places to shop, though it's not available where I live, so when I'm traveling, I always stop by, as they have products I enjoy - have never worried about the politics of anyone involved in the process - but seeing how one side is so opposed to this individual, I will try to double my purchases through there, and I hope you do to, to offset the confused - but don't worry, I'm sure Obama will be happy to do all their thinking for them - and that is rather sad. Best Wishes John Mackey!!!!!! And visit the store site http://www.wholefoodsmarket.com/ (and even take in the forum, read a couple posts, and you'll really wonder why we're called "thugs," and "mobs," and "astroturf?," - there is even someone on there (actually many someones) who want the "right-wing Limbaugh listeners" (for the record, I'm not right-wing, nor do I listen to Limbaugh, but I do like John Mackey's views) to prove they shop there by producing receipts - unreal - but don't lower yourselves to their level - they're just not worth it! I've got to be honest, I don't understand the outrage (asked a liberal associate of mine, they sputtered for awhile, then finally said, "You wouldn't understand," - perhaps it's because Mackey's program & reforms make sense - that would be a fly in the ointment for those pushing socialized (i.e., you pay for everyone, and the Government will run it) health care:

"The Whole Foods Alternative to ObamaCare
by John Mackey

“The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.”
—Margaret Thatcher

With a projected $1.8 trillion deficit for 2009, several trillions more in deficits projected over the next decade, and with both Medicare and Social Security entitlement spending about to ratchet up several notches over the next 15 years as Baby Boomers become eligible for both, we are rapidly running out of other people’s money. These deficits are simply not sustainable. They are either going to result in unprecedented new taxes and inflation, or they will bankrupt us.
While we clearly need health-care reform, the last thing our country needs is a massive new health-care entitlement that will create hundreds of billions of dollars of new unfunded deficits and move us much closer to a government takeover of our health-care system. Instead, we should be trying to achieve reforms by moving in the opposite direction—toward less government control and more individual empowerment. Here are eight reforms that would greatly lower the cost of health care for everyone:
• Remove the legal obstacles that slow the creation of high-deductible health insurance plans and health savings accounts (HSAs). The combination of high-deductible health insurance and HSAs is one solution that could solve many of our health-care problems. For example, Whole Foods Market pays 100% of the premiums for all our team members who work 30 hours or more per week (about 89% of all team members) for our high-deductible health-insurance plan. We also provide up to $1,800 per year in additional health-care dollars through deposits into employees’ Personal Wellness Accounts to spend as they choose on their own health and wellness.
Money not spent in one year rolls over to the next and grows over time. Our team members therefore spend their own health-care dollars until the annual deductible is covered (about $2,500) and the insurance plan kicks in. This creates incentives to spend the first $2,500 more carefully. Our plan’s costs are much lower than typical health insurance, while providing a very high degree of worker satisfaction.
• Equalize the tax laws so that that employer-provided health insurance and individually owned health insurance have the same tax benefits. Now employer health insurance benefits are fully tax deductible, but individual health insurance is not. This is unfair.
• Repeal all state laws which prevent insurance companies from competing across state lines. We should all have the legal right to purchase health insurance from any insurance company in any state and we should be able use that insurance wherever we live. Health insurance should be portable.
• Repeal government mandates regarding what insurance companies must cover. These mandates have increased the cost of health insurance by billions of dollars. What is insured and what is not insured should be determined by individual customer preferences and not through special-interest lobbying.
• Enact tort reform to end the ruinous lawsuits that force doctors to pay insurance costs of hundreds of thousands of dollars per year. These costs are passed back to us through much higher prices for health care.
• Make costs transparent so that consumers understand what health-care treatments cost. How many people know the total cost of their last doctor’s visit and how that total breaks down? What other goods or services do we buy without knowing how much they will cost us?
• Enact Medicare reform. We need to face up to the actuarial fact that Medicare is heading towards bankruptcy and enact reforms that create greater patient empowerment, choice and responsibility.
• Finally, revise tax forms to make it easier for individuals to make a voluntary, tax-deductible donation to help the millions of people who have no insurance and aren’t covered by Medicare, Medicaid or the State Children’s Health Insurance Program.
Many promoters of health-care reform believe that people have an intrinsic ethical right to health care—to equal access to doctors, medicines and hospitals. While all of us empathize with those who are sick, how can we say that all people have more of an intrinsic right to health care than they have to food or shelter?
Health care is a service that we all need, but just like food and shelter it is best provided through voluntary and mutually beneficial market exchanges. A careful reading of both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution will not reveal any intrinsic right to health care, food or shelter. That’s because there isn’t any. This “right” has never existed in America
Even in countries like Canada and the U.K., there is no intrinsic right to health care. Rather, citizens in these countries are told by government bureaucrats what health-care treatments they are eligible to receive and when they can receive them. All countries with socialized medicine ration health care by forcing their citizens to wait in lines to receive scarce treatments.
Although Canada has a population smaller than California, 830,000 Canadians are currently waiting to be admitted to a hospital or to get treatment, according to a report last month in Investor’s Business Daily. In England, the waiting list is 1.8 million.
At Whole Foods we allow our team members to vote on what benefits they most want the company to fund. Our Canadian and British employees express their benefit preferences very clearly—they want supplemental health-care dollars that they can control and spend themselves without permission from their governments. Why would they want such additional health-care benefit dollars if they already have an “intrinsic right to health care”? The answer is clear—no such right truly exists in either Canada or the U.K.—or in any other country.
Rather than increase government spending and control, we need to address the root causes of poor health. This begins with the realization that every American adult is responsible for his or her own health.
Unfortunately many of our health-care problems are self-inflicted: two-thirds of Americans are now overweight and one-third are obese. Most of the diseases that kill us and account for about 70% of all health-care spending—heart disease, cancer, stroke, diabetes and obesity—are mostly preventable through proper diet, exercise, not smoking, minimal alcohol consumption and other healthy lifestyle choices.
Recent scientific and medical evidence shows that a diet consisting of foods that are plant-based, nutrient dense and low-fat will help prevent and often reverse most degenerative diseases that kill us and are expensive to treat. We should be able to live largely disease-free lives until we are well into our 90s and even past 100 years of age.
Health-care reform is very important. Whatever reforms are enacted it is essential that they be financially responsible, and that we have the freedom to choose doctors and the health-care services that best suit our own unique set of lifestyle choices. We are all responsible for our own lives and our own health. We should take that responsibility very seriously and use our freedom to make wise lifestyle choices that will protect our health. Doing so will enrich our lives and will help create a vibrant and sustainable American society."

—Mr. Mackey is co-founder and CEO of Whole Foods Market Inc.Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page A15

John Galt More Than Ever!

2009-08-13T09:53:00.000-07:00

Every now and then, we need to reminded that our faith in the free-market system is stronger than any thing that those who believe government is the solution, can throw at us. We must never give up - we must stand together, or kneel separately. We need the vision of John Galt more than ever!

"For twelve years, you have been asking: Who is John Galt? This is John Galt speaking. I am the man who loves his life. I am the man who does not sacrifice his love or his values. I am the man who has deprived you of victims and thus has destroyed your world, and if you wish to know why you are perishing-you who dread knowledge-I am the man who will now tell you.” The chief engineer was the only one able to move; he ran to a television set and struggled frantically with its dials. But the screen remained empty; the speaker had not chosen to be seen. Only his voice filled the airways of the country-of the world, thought the chief engineer-sounding as if he were speaking here, in this room, not to a group, but to one man; it was not the tone of addressing a meeting, but the tone of addressing a mind.
“You have heard it said that this is an age of moral crisis. You have said it yourself, half in fear, half in hope that the words had no meaning. You have cried that man’s sins are destroying the world and you have cursed human nature for its unwillingness to practice the virtues you demanded. Since virtue, to you, consists of sacrifice, you have demanded more sacrifices at every successive disaster. In the name of a return to morality, you have sacrificed all those evils which you held as the cause of your plight. You have sacrificed justice to mercy. You have sacrificed independence to unity. You have sacrificed reason to faith. You have sacrificed wealth to need. You have sacrificed self-esteem to self-denial. You have sacrificed happiness to duty.
“You have destroyed all that which you held to be evil and achieved all that which you held to be good. Why, then, do you shrink in horror from the sight of the world around you? That world is not the product of your sins, it is the product and the image of your virtues. It is your moral ideal brought into reality in its full and final perfection. You have fought for it, you have dreamed of it, and you have wished it, and I-I am the man who has granted you your wish.
“Your ideal had an implacable enemy, which your code of morality was designed to destroy. I have withdrawn that enemy. I have taken it out of your way and out of your reach. I have removed the source of all those evils you were sacrificing one by one. I have ended your battle. I have stopped your motor. I have deprived your world of man’s mind.
“Men do not live by the mind, you say? I have withdrawn those who do. The mind is impotent, you say? I have withdrawn those whose mind isn’t. There are values higher than the mind, you say? I have withdrawn those for whom there aren’t.
“While you were dragging to your sacrificial altars the men of justice, of independence, of reason, of wealth, of self-esteem-I beat you to it, I reached them first. I told them the nature of the game you were playing and the nature of that moral code of yours, which they had been too innocently generous to grasp. I showed them the way to live by another morality-mine. It is mine that they chose to follow.
“All the men who have vanished, the men you hated, yet dreaded to lose, it is I who have taken them away from you. Do not attempt to find us. We do not choose to be found. Do not cry that it is our duty to serve you. We do not recognize such duty. Do not cry that you need us. We do not consider need a claim. Do not cry that you own us. You don’t. Do not beg us to return. We are on strike, we, the men of the mind.
“We are on strike against self-immolation. We are on strike against the creed of unearned rewards and unrewarded duties. We are on strike against the dogma that the pursuit of one’s happiness is evil. We are on strike against the doctrine that life is guilt.
“There is a difference between our strike and all those you’ve practiced for centuries: our strike consists, not of making demands, but of granting them. We are evil, according to your morality. We have chosen not to harm you any longer. We are useless, according to your economics. We have chosen not to exploit you any longer. We are dangerous and to be shackled, according to your politics. We have chosen not to endanger you, nor to wear the shackles any longer. We are only an illusion, according to your philosophy. We have chosen not to blind you any longer and have left you free to face reality-the reality you wanted, the world as you see it now, a world without mind.
“We have granted you everything you demanded of us, we who had always been the givers, but have only now understood it. We have no demands to present to you, no terms to bargain about, no compromise to reach. You have nothing to offer us. We do not need you.
“Are you now crying: No, this was not what you wanted? A mindless world of ruins was not your goal? You did not want us to leave you? You moral cannibals, I know that you’ve always known what it was that you wanted. But your game is up, because now we know it, too.
“Through centuries of scourges and disasters, brought about by your code of morality, you have cried that your code had been broken, that the scourges were punishment for breaking it, that men were too weak and too selfish to spill all the blood it required. You damned man, you damned existence, you damned this earth, but never dared to question your code. Your victims took the blame and struggled on, with your curses as reward for their martyrdom-while you went on crying that your code was noble, but human nature was not good enough to practice it. And no one rose to ask the question: Good?-by what standard?
“You wanted to know John Galt’s identity. I am the man who has asked that question.
“Yes, this is an age of moral crisis. Yes, you are bearing punishment for your evil. But it is not man who is now on trial and it is not human nature that will take the blame. It is your moral code that’s through, this time. Your moral code has reached its climax, the blind alley at the end of its course. And if you wish to go on living, what you now need is not to return to morality-you who have never known any-but to discover it.
“You have heard no concepts of morality but the mystical or the social. You have been taught that morality is a code of behavior imposed on you by whim, the whim of a supernatural power or the whim of society, to serve God’s purpose or your neighbor’s welfare, to please an authority beyond the grave or else next door-but not to serve your life or pleasure. Your pleasure, you have been taught, is to be found in immorality, your interests would best be served by evil, and any moral code must be designed not for you, but against you, not to further your life, but to drain it.
“For centuries, the battle of morality was fought between those who claimed that your life belongs to God and those who claimed that it belongs to your neighbors-between those who preached that the good is self-sacrifice for the sake of ghosts in heaven and those who preached that the good is self-sacrifice for the sake of incompetents on earth. And no one came to say that your life belongs to you and that the good is to live it.
“Both sides agreed that morality demands the surrender of your self-interest and of your mind, that the moral and the practical are opposites, that morality is not the province of reason, but the province of faith and force. Both sides agreed that no rational morality is possible, that there is no right or wrong in reason-that in reason there’s no reason to be moral.
“Whatever else they fought about, it was against man’s mind that all your moralists have stood united. It was man’s mind that all their schemes and systems were intended to despoil and destroy. Now choose to perish or to learn that the anti-mind is the anti-life.
“Man’s mind is his basic tool of survival. Life is given to him, survival is not. His body is given to him, its sustenance is not. His mind is given to him, its content is not. To remain alive, he must act, and before he can act he must know the nature and purpose of his action. He cannot obtain his food without a knowledge of food and of the way to obtain it. He cannot dig a ditch-or build a cyclotron-without a knowledge of his aim and of the means to achieve it. To remain alive, he must think.
“But to think is an act of choice. The key to what you so recklessly call ‘human nature,’ the open secret you live with, yet dread to name, is the fact that man is a being of volitional consciousness. Reason does not work automatically; thinking is not a mechanical process; the connections of logic are not made by instinct. The function of your stomach, lungs or heart is automatic; the function of your mind is not. In any hour and issue of your life, you are free to think or to evade that effort. But you are not free to escape from your nature, from the fact that reason is your means of survival-so that for you, who are a human being, the question ‘to be or not to be’ is the question ‘to’ think or not to think.’
“A being of volitional consciousness has no automatic course of behavior. He needs a code of values to guide his actions. ‘Value’ is that which one acts to gain and keep, ‘virtue’ is the action by which one gains and keeps it. ‘Value’ presupposes an answer to the question: of value to whom and for what? ‘Value’ presupposes a standard, a purpose and the necessity of action in the face of an alternative. Where there are no alternatives, no values are possible.
“There is only one fundamental alternative in the universe: existence or non-existence-and it pertains to a single class of entities: to living organisms. The existence of inanimate matter is unconditional, the existence of life is not; it depends on a specific course of action. Matter is indestructible, it changes its forms, but it cannot cease to exist. It is only a living organism that faces a constant alternative: the issue of life or death. Life is a process of self-sustaining and-self-generated action. If an organism fails in that action, it does; its chemical elements remain, but its life goes out of existence. It is only the concept of ‘Life’ that makes the concept of ‘Value’ possible. It is only to a living entity that things can be good or evil.
“A plant must feed itself in order to live; the sunlight, the water, the chemicals it needs are the values its nature has set it to pursue; its life is the standard of value directing its actions. But a plant has no choice of action; there are alternatives in the conditions it encounters, but there is no alternative in its function: it acts automatically to further its life, it cannot act for its own destruction.
“An animal is equipped for sustaining its life; its senses provide it with an automatic code of action, an automatic knowledge of what is good for it or evil. It has no power to extend its knowledge or to evade it. In conditions where its knowledge proves inadequate, it dies. But so long as it lives, it acts on its knowledge, with automatic safety and no power of choice, it is unable to ignore its own good, unable to decide to choose the evil and act as its own destroyer.
“Man has no automatic code of survival. His particular distinction from all other living species is the necessity to act in the face of alternatives by means of volitional choice. He has no automatic knowledge of what is good for him or evil, what values his life depends on, what course of action it requires. Are you prattling about an instinct of self-preservation? An instinct of self-preservation is precisely what man does not possess. An ‘instinct’ is an unerring and automatic form of knowledge. A desire is not an instinct. A desire to live does not give you the knowledge required for living. And even man’s desire to live is not automatic: your secret evil today is that that is the desire you do not hold. Your fear of death is not a love of life and will not give you the knowledge needed to keep it. Man must obtain his knowledge and choose his actions by a process of thinking, which nature will not force him t9 perform. Man has the power to act as his own destroyer-and that is the way he has acted through most of his history.
“A living entity that regarded its means of survival as evil, would not survive. A plant that struggled to mangle its roots, a bird that fought to break its wings would not remain for long in the existence they affronted. But the history of man has been a struggle to deny and to destroy his mind.
“Man has been called a rational being, but rationality is a matter of choice-and the alternative his nature offers him is: rational being or suicidal animal. Man has to be man-by choice; he has to hold his life as a value-by choice: he has to learn to sustain it-by choice; he has to discover the values it requires and practice his virtues-by choice.
“A code of values accepted by choice is a code of morality.
“Whoever you are, you who are hearing me now, I am speaking to whatever living remnant is left uncorrupted within you, to the remnant of the human, to your mind, and I say: There is a morality of reason, a morality proper to man, and Man’s Life is its standard of value.
“All that which is proper to the life of a rational being is the good; all that which destroys it is the evil.
“Man’s life, as required by his nature, is not the life of a mindless brute, of a looting thug or a mooching mystic, but the life of a thinking being-not life by means of force or fraud, but life by means of achievement-not survival at any price, since there’s only one price that pays for man’s survival: reason.
“Man’s life is the standard of morality, but your own life is its purpose. If existence on earth is your goal, you must choose your actions and values by the standard of that which is proper to man-for the purpose of preserving, fulfilling and enjoying the irreplaceable value which is your life.
“Since life requires a specific course of action, any other course will destroy it. A being who does not hold his own life as the motive and goal of his actions, is acting on the motive and standard of death. Such a being is a metaphysical monstrosity, struggling to oppose, negate and contradict the fact of his own existence, running blindly amuck on a trail of destruction, capable of nothing but pain.
“Happiness is the successful state of life, pain is an agent of death. Happiness is that state of consciousness which proceeds from the achievement of one’s values. A morality that dares to tell you to find happiness in the renunciation of your happiness-to value the failure of your values-is an insolent negation of morality. A doctrine that gives you, as an ideal, the role of a sacrificial animal seeking slaughter on the altars of others, is giving you death as your standard. By the grace of reality and the nature of life, man-every man-is an end in himself, he exists for his own sake, and the achievement of his own happiness is his highest moral purpose.
“But neither life nor happiness can be achieved by the pursuit of irrational whims. Just as man is free to attempt to survive in any random manner, but will perish unless he lives as his nature requires, so he is free to seek his happiness in any mindless fraud, but the torture of frustration is all he will find, unless he seeks the happiness proper to man. The purpose of morality is to teach you, not to suffer and die, but to enjoy yourself and live.
“Sweep aside those parasites of subsidized classrooms, who live on the profits of the mind of others and proclaim that man needs no morality, no values, no code of behavior. They, who pose as scientists and claim that man is only an animal, do not grant him inclusion in the law of existence they have granted to the lowest of insects. They recognize that every living species has a way of survival demanded by its nature, they do not claim that a fish can live out of water or that a dog can live without its sense of smell-but man, they claim, the most complex of beings, man can survive in any way whatever, man has no identity, no nature, and there’s no practical reason why he cannot live with his means of survival destroyed, with his mind throttled and placed at the disposal of any orders they might care to issue.
“Sweep aside those hatred-eaten mystics, who pose as friends of humanity and preach that the highest virtue man can practice is to hold his own life as of no value. Do they tell you that the purpose of morality is to curb man’s instinct of self-preservation? It is for the purpose of self-preservation that man needs a code of morality. The only man who desires to be moral is the man who desires to live.
“No, you do not have to live; it is your basic act of choice; but if you choose to live,. you must live as a man-by the work and the judgment of your mind.
“No, you do not have to live as a man; it is an act of moral choice. But you cannot live as anything else-and the alternative is that state of living death which you now see within you and around you, the state of a thing unfit for existence, no longer human and less than animal, a thing that knows nothing but pain and drags itself through its span of years in the agony of unthinking self-destruction.
“No, you do not have to think; it is an act of moral choice. But someone had to think to keep you alive; if you choose to default, you default on existence and you pass the deficit to some moral man, expecting him to sacrifice his good for the sake of letting you survive by your evil.
“No, you do not have to be a man; but today those who are, are not there any longer. I have removed your means of survival-your victims.
“If you wish to know how I have done it and what I told them to make them quit, you are hearing it now. I told them, in essence, the statement I am making tonight. They were men who had lived by my code, but had not known how great a virtue it represented. I made them see it. I brought them, not a re-evaluation, but only an identification of their values.
“We, the men of the mind, are now on strike against you in the name of a single axiom, which is the root of our moral code, just as the root of yours is the wish to escape it: the axiom that existence exists.
“Existence exists-and the act of grasping that statement implies two corollary axioms: that something exists which one perceives and that one exists possessing consciousness, consciousness being the faculty of perceiving that which exists.
“If nothing exists, there can be no consciousness: a consciousness with nothing to be conscious of is a contradiction in terms. A consciousness conscious of nothing but itself is a contradiction in terms: before it could identify itself as consciousness, it had to be conscious of something. If that which you claim to perceive does not exist, what you possess is not consciousness.
“Whatever the degree of your knowledge, these two-existence and consciousness-are axioms you cannot escape, these two are the irreducible primaries implied in any action you undertake, in any part of your knowledge and in its sum, from the first ray of light you perceive at the start of your life to the widest erudition you might acquire at its end. Whether you know the shape of a pebble or the structure of a solar system, the axioms remain the same: that it exists and that you know it.
“To exist is to be something, as distinguished from the nothing of non-existence, it is to be an entity of a specific nature made of specific attributes. Centuries ago, the man who was-no matter what his errors-the greatest of your philosophers, has stated the formula defining the concept of existence and the rule of all knowledge: A is A. A thing is itself. You have never grasped the meaning of his statement. I am here to complete it: Existence is Identity, Consciousness is Identification.
“Whatever you choose to consider, be it an object, an attribute or an action, the law of identity remains the same. A leaf cannot be a stone at the same time, it cannot be all red and all green at the same time, it cannot freeze and burn at the same time. A is A. Or, if you wish it stated in simpler language: You cannot have your cake and eat it, too.
“Are you seeking to know what is wrong with the world? All the disasters that have wrecked your world, came from your leaders’ attempt to evade the fact that A is A. All the secret evil you dread to face within you and all the pain you have ever endured, came from your own attempt to evade the fact that A is A. The purpose of those who taught you to evade it, was to make you forget that Man is Man.
“Man cannot survive except by gaining knowledge, and reason is his only means to gain it. Reason is the faculty that perceives, identifies and integrates the material provided by his senses. The task of his senses is to give him the evidence of existence, but the task of identifying it belongs to his reason, his senses tell him only that something is, but what it is must be learned by his mind.
“All thinking is a process of identification and integration. Man perceives a blob of color; by integrating the evidence of his sight and his touch, he learns to identify it as a solid object; he learns to identify the object as a table; he learns that the table is made of wood; he learns that the wood consists of cells, that the cells consist of molecules, that the molecules consist of atoms. All through this process, the work of his mind consists of answers to a single question: What is it? His means to establish the truth of his answers is logic, and logic rests on the axiom that existence exists. Logic is the art of non-contradictory identification. A contradiction cannot exist. An atom is itself, and so is the universe; neither can contradict its own identity; nor can a part contradict the whole. No concept man forms is valid unless he integrates it without contradiction into the total sum of his knowledge. To arrive at a contradiction is to confess an error in one’s thinking; to maintain a contradiction is to abdicate one’s mind and to evict oneself from the realm of reality.
“Reality is that which exists; the unreal does not exist; the unreal is merely that negation of existence which is the content of a human consciousness when it attempts to abandon reason. Truth is the recognition of reality; reason, man’s only means of knowledge, is his only standard of truth.
“The most depraved sentence you can now utter is to ask: Whose reason? The answer is: Yours. No matter how vast your knowledge or how modest, it is your own mind that has to acquire it. It is only with your own knowledge that you can deal. It is only your own knowledge that you can claim to possess or ask others to consider. Your mind is your only judge of truth-and if others dissent from your verdict, reality is the court of final appeal. Nothing but a man’s mind can perform that complex, delicate, crucial process of identification which is thinking. Nothing can direct the process but his own judgment. Nothing can direct his judgment but his moral integrity.
“You who speak of a ‘moral instinct’ as if it were some separate endowment opposed to reason-man’s reason is his moral faculty. A process of reason is a process of constant choice in answer to the question: True or False?-Right or Wrong? Is a seed to be planted in soil in order to grow-right or wrong? Is a man’s wound to be disinfected in order to save his life-right or wrong? Does the nature of atmospheric electricity permit it to be converted into kinetic power-right or wrong? It is the answers to such questions that gave you everything you have-and the answers came from a man’s mind, a mind of intransigent devotion to that which is right.
“A rational process is a moral process. You may make an error at any step of it, with nothing to protect you but your own severity, or you may try to cheat, to fake the evidence and evade the effort of the quest-but if devotion to truth is the hallmark of morality, then there is no greater, nobler, more heroic form of devotion than the act of a man who assumes the responsibility of thinking.
“That which you call your soul or spirit is your consciousness, and that which you call ‘free will’ is your mind’s freedom to think or not, the only will you have, your only freedom, the choice that controls all the choices you make and determines your life and your character.
“Thinking is man’s only basic virtue, from which all the others proceed. And his basic vice, the source of all his evils, is that nameless act which all of you practice, but struggle never to admit: the act of blanking out, the willful suspension of one’s consciousness, the refusal to think-not blindness, but the refusal to see; not ignorance, but the refusal to know. It is the act of unfocusing your mind and inducing an inner fog to escape the responsibility of judgment-on the unstated premise that a thing will not exist if only you refuse to identify it, that A will not be A so long as you do not pronounce the verdict ‘It is.’ Non-thinking is an act of annihilation, a wish to negate existence, an attempt to wipe out reality. But existence exists; reality is not to be wiped out, it will merely wipe out the wiper. By refusing to say ‘It is,’ you are refusing to say ‘I am.’ By suspending your judgment, you are negating your person. When a man declares: ‘Who am I to know?’-he is declaring: ‘Who am I to live?’
“This, in every hour and every issue, is your basic moral choice: thinking or non-thinking, existence or non-existence, A or non-A, entity or zero.
“To the extent to which a man is rational, life is the premise directing his actions. To the extent to which he is irrational, the premise directing his actions is death.
“You who prattle that morality is social and that man would need no morality on a desert island-it is on a desert island that he would need it most. Let him try to claim, when there are no victims to pay for it, that a rock is a house, that sand is clothing, that food will drop into his mouth without cause or effort, that he will collect a harvest tomorrow by devouring his stock seed today-and reality will wipe him out, as he deserves; reality will show him that life is a value to be bought and that thinking is the only coin noble enough to buy it.
“If I were to speak your kind of language, I would say that man’s only moral commandment is: Thou shalt think. But a ‘moral commandment’ is a contradiction in terms. The moral is the chosen, not the forced; the understood, not the obeyed. The moral is the rational, and reason accepts no commandments.
“My morality, the morality of reason, is contained in a single axiom: existence exists-and in a single choice: to live. The rest proceeds from these. To live, man must hold three things as the supreme and ruling values of his life: Reason-Purpose-Self-esteem. Reason, as his only tool of knowledge-Purpose, as his choice of the happiness which that tool must proceed to achieve-Self-esteem, as his inviolate certainty that his mind is competent to think and his person is worthy of happiness, which means: is worthy of living. These three values imply and require all of man’s virtues, and all his virtues pertain to the relation of existence and consciousness: rationality, independence, integrity, honesty, justice, productiveness, pride.
“Rationality is the recognition of the fact that existence exists, that nothing can alter the truth and nothing can take precedence over that act of perceiving it, which is thinking-that the mind is one’s only judge of values and one’s only guide of action-that reason is an absolute that permits no compromise-that a concession to the irrational invalidates one’s consciousness and turns it from the task of perceiving to the task of faking reality-that the alleged short-cut to knowledge, which is faith, is only a short-circuit destroying the mind-that the acceptance of a mystical invention is a wish for the annihilation of existence and, properly, annihilates one’s consciousness.
“Independence is the recognition of the fact that yours is the responsibility of judgment and nothing can help you escape it-that no substitute can do your thinking, as no pinch-hitter can live your life-that the vilest form of self-abasement and self-destruction is the subordination of your mind to the mind of another, the acceptance of an authority over your brain, the acceptance of his assertions as facts, his say-so as truth, his edicts as middle-man between your consciousness and your existence.
“Integrity is the recognition of the fact that you cannot fake your consciousness, just as honesty is the recognition of the fact that you cannot fake existence-that man is an indivisible entity, an integrated unit of two attributes: of matter and consciousness, and that he may permit no breach between body and mind, between action and thought, between his life and his convictions-that, like a judge impervious to public opinion, he may not sacrifice his convictions to the wishes of others, be it the whole of mankind shouting pleas or threats against him-that courage and confidence are practical necessities, that courage is the practical form of being true to existence, of being true to one’s own consciousness.
“Honesty is the recognition of the fact that the unreal is unreal and can have no value, that neither love nor fame nor cash is a value if obtained by fraud-that an attempt to gain a value by deceiving the mind of others is an act of raising your victims to a position higher than reality, where you become a pawn of their blindness, a slave of their non-thinking and their evasions, while their intelligence, their rationality, their perceptiveness become the enemies you have to dread and flee-that you do not care to live as a dependent, least of all a dependent on the stupidity of others, or as a fool whose source of values is the fools he succeeds in fooling-that honesty is not a social duty, not a sacrifice for the sake of others, but the most profoundly selfish virtue man can practice: his refusal to sacrifice the reality of his own existence to the deluded consciousness of others.
“Justice is the recognition of the fact that you cannot fake the character of men as you cannot fake the character of nature, that you must judge all men as conscientiously as you judge inanimate objects, with the same respect for truth, with the same incorruptible vision, by as pure and as rational a process of identification-that every man must be judged for what he is and treated accordingly, that just as you do not pay a higher price for a rusty chunk of scrap than for a piece of shining metal, so you do not value a totter above a hero-that your moral appraisal is the coin paying men for their virtues or vices, and this payment demands of you as scrupulous an honor as you bring to financial transactions-that to withhold your contempt from men’s vices is an act of moral counterfeiting, and to withhold your admiration from their virtues is an act of moral embezzlement-that to place any other concern higher than justice is to devaluate your moral currency and defraud the good in favor of the evil, since only the good can lose by a default of justice and only the evil can profit-and that the bottom of the pit at the end of that road, the act of moral bankruptcy, is to punish men for their virtues and reward them for their vices, that that is the collapse to full depravity, the Black Mass of the worship of death, the dedication of your consciousness to the destruction of existence.
“Productiveness is your acceptance of morality, your recognition of the fact that you choose to live-that productive work is the process by which man’s consciousness controls his existence, a constant process of acquiring knowledge and shaping matter to fit one’s purpose, of translating an idea into physical form, of remaking the earth in the image of one’s values-that all work is creative work if done by a thinking mind, and no work is creative if done by a blank who repeats in uncritical stupor a routine he has learned from others- that your work is yours to choose, and the choice is as wide as your mind, that nothing more is possible to you and nothing less is human-that to cheat your way into a job bigger than your mind can handle is to become a fear-corroded ape on borrowed motions and borrowed time, and to settle down into a job that requires less than your mind’s full capacity is to cut your motor and sentence yourself to another kind of motion: decay-that your work is the process of achieving your values, and to lose your ambition for values is to lose your ambition to live-that your body is a machine, but your mind is its driver, and you must drive as far as your mind will take you, with achievement as the goal of your road-that the man who has no purpose is a machine that coasts downhill at the mercy of any boulder to crash in the first chance ditch, that the man who stifles his mind is a stalled machine slowly going to rust, that the man who lets a leader prescribe his course is a wreck being towed to the scrap heap, and the man who makes another man his goal is a hitchhiker no driver should ever pick up-that your work is the purpose of your life, and you must speed past any killer who assumes the right to stop you, that any value you might find outside your work, any other loyalty or love, can be only travelers you choose to share your journey and must be travelers going on their own power in the same direction.
“Pride is the recognition of the fact that you are your own highest value and, like all of man’s values, it has to be earned-that of any achievements open to you, the one that makes all others possible is the creation of your own character-that your character, your actions, your desires, your emotions are the products of the premises held by your mind-that as man must produce the physical values he needs to sustain his life, so he must acquire the values of character that make his life worth sustaining-that as man is a being of self-made wealth, so he is a being of self-made soul-that to live requires a sense of self-value, but man, who has no automatic values, has no automatic sense of self-esteem and must earn it by shaping his soul in the image of his moral ideal, in the image of Man, the rational being he is born able to create, but must create by choice-that the first precondition of self-esteem is that radiant selfishness of soul which desires the best in all things, in values of matter and spirit, a soul that seeks above all else to achieve its own moral perfection, valuing nothing higher than itself-and that the proof of an achieved self-esteem is your soul’s shudder of contempt and rebellion against the role of a sacrificial animal, against the vile impertinence of any creed that proposes to immolate the irreplaceable value which is your consciousness and the incomparable glory which is your existence to the blind evasions and the stagnant decay of others.
“Are you beginning to see who is John Galt? I am the man who has earned the thing you did not fight for, the thing you have renounced, betrayed, corrupted, yet were unable fully to destroy and are now hiding as your guilty secret, spending your life in apologies to every professional cannibal, lest it be discovered that somewhere within you, you still long to say what I am now saying to the hearing of the whole of mankind: I am proud of my own value and of the fact that I wish to live.
“This wish-which you share, yet submerge as an evil-is the only remnant of the good within you, but it is a wish one must learn to deserve. His own happiness is man’s only moral purpose, but only his own virtue can achieve it. Virtue is not an end in itself. Virtue is not its own reward or sacrificial fodder for the reward of evil. Life is the reward of virtue-and happiness is the goal and the reward of life.
“Just as your body has two fundamental sensations, pleasure and pain, as signs of its welfare or injury, as a barometer of its basic alternative, life or death, so your consciousness has two fundamental emotions, joy and suffering, in answer to the same alternative. Your emotions are estimates of that which furthers your life or threatens it, lightning calculators giving you a sum of your profit or loss. You have no choice about your capacity to feel that something is good for you or evil, but what you will consider good or evil, what will give you joy or pain, what you will love or hate, desire or fear, depends on your standard of value. Emotions are inherent in your nature, but their content is dictated by your mind. Your emotional capacity is an empty motor, and your values are the fuel with which your mind fills it. If you choose a mix of contradictions, it will clog your motor, corrode your transmission and wreck you on your first attempt to move with a machine which you, the driver, have corrupted.
“If you hold the irrational as your standard of value and the impossible as your concept of the good, if you long for rewards you have not earned, for a fortune, or a love you don’t deserve, for a loophole in the law of causality, for an A that becomes non-A at your whim, if you desire the opposite of existence-you will reach it. Do not cry, when you reach it, that life is frustration and that happiness is impossible to man; check your fuel: it brought you where you wanted to go.
“Happiness is not to be achieved at the command of emotional whims. Happiness is not the satisfaction of whatever irrational wishes you might blindly attempt to indulge. Happiness is a state of non-contradictory joy-a joy without penalty or guilt, a joy that does not clash with any of your values and does not work for your own destruction, not the joy of escaping from your mind, but of using your mind’s fullest power, not the joy of faking reality, but of achieving values that are real, not the joy of a drunkard, but of a producer. Happiness is possible only to a rational man, the man who desires nothing but rational goals, seeks nothing but rational values and finds his joy in nothing but rational actions.
“Just as I support my life, neither by robbery nor alms, but by my own effort, so I do not seek to derive my happiness from the injury or the favor of others, but earn it by my own achievement. Just as I do not consider the pleasure of others as the goal of my life, so I do not consider my pleasure as the goal of the lives of others. Just as there are no contradictions in my values and no conflicts among my desires-so there are no victims and no conflicts of interest among rational men, men who do not desire the unearned and do not view one another with a cannibal’s lust, men who neither make sacrifice nor accept them.
“The symbol of all relationships among such men, the moral symbol of respect for human beings, is the trader. We, who live by values, not by loot, are traders, both in matter and in spirit. A trader is a man who earns what he gets and does not give or take the undeserved. A trader does not ask to be paid for his failures, nor does he ask to be loved for his flaws. A trader does not squander his body as fodder or his soul as alms. Just as he does not give his work except in trade for material values, so he does not give the values of his spirit-his love, his friendship, his esteem-except in payment and in trade for human virtues, in payment for his own selfish pleasure, which he receives from men he can respect. The mystic parasites who have, throughout the ages, reviled the traders and held them in contempt, while honoring the beggars and the looters, have known the secret motive of their sneers: a trader is the entity they dread-a man of justice.
“Do you ask what moral obligation I owe to my fellow men? None-except the obligation I owe to myself, to material objects and to all of existence: rationality. I deal with men as my nature and their demands: by means of reason. I seek or desire nothing from them except such relations as they care to enter of their own voluntary choice. It is only with their mind that I can deal and only for my own self-interest, when they see that my interest coincides with theirs. When they don’t, I enter no relationship; I let dissenters go their way and I do not swerve from mine. I win by means of nothing but logic and I surrender to nothing but logic. I do not surrender my reason or deal with men who surrender theirs. I have nothing to gain from fools or cowards; I have no benefits to seek from human vices: from stupidity, dishonesty or fear. The only value men can offer me is the work of their mind. When I disagree with a rational man, I let reality be our final arbiter; if I am right, he will learn; if I am wrong, I will; one of us will win, but both will profit.
“Whatever may be open to disagreement, there is one act of evil that may not, the act that no man may commit against others and no man may sanction or forgive. So long as men desire to live together, no man may initiate-do you hear me? no man may start-the use of physical force against others.
“To interpose the threat of physical destruction between a man and his perception of reality, is to negate and paralyze his means of survival; to force-him to act against his own judgment, is like forcing him to act against his own sight. Whoever, to whatever purpose or extent, initiates the use of force, is a killer acting on the premise of death in a manner wider than murder: the premise of destroying man’s capacity to live.
“Do not open your mouth to tell me that your mind has convinced you of your right to force my mind. Force and mind are opposites; morality ends where a gun begins. When you declare that men are irrational animals and propose to treat them as such, you define thereby your own character and can no longer claim the sanction of reason-as no advocate of contradictions can claim it. There can be no ‘right’ to destroy the source of rights, the only means of judging right and wrong: the mind.
“To force a man to drop his own mind and to accept your will as a substitute, with a gun in place of a syllogism, with terror in place of proof, and death as the final argument-is to attempt to exist in defiance of reality. Reality demands of man that he act for his own rational interest; your gun demands of him that he act against it. Reality threatens man with death if he does not act on his rational judgment: you threaten him with death if he does. You place him into a world where the price of his life is the surrender of all the virtues required by life-and death by a process of gradual destruction is all that you and your system will achieve, when death is made to be the ruling power, the winning argument in a society of men.
“Be it a highwayman who confronts a traveler with the ultimatum: ‘Your money or your life,’ or a politician who confronts a country with the ultimatum: ‘Your children’s education or your life,’ the meaning of that ultimatum is: ‘Your mind or your life’-and neither is possible to man without the other.
“If there are degrees of evil, it is hard to say who is the more contemptible: the brute who assumes the right to force the mind of others or the moral degenerate who grants to others the right to force his mind. That is the moral absolute one does not leave open to debate. I do not grant the terms of reason to men who propose to deprive me of reason. I do not enter discussions with neighbors who think they can forbid me to think. I do not place my moral sanction upon a murderer’s wish to kill me. When a man attempts to deal with me by force, I answer him-by force.
“It is only as retaliation that force may be used and only against the man who starts its use. No, I do not share his evil or sink to his concept of morality: I merely grant him his choice, destruction, the only destruction he had the right to choose: his own. He uses force to seize a value; I use it only to destroy destruction. A holdup man seeks to gain wealth by killing me; I do not grow richer by killing a holdup man. I seek no values by means of evil, nor do I surrender my values to evil.
“In the name of all the producers who had kept you alive and received your death ultimatums in payment, I now answer you with a single ultimatum of our own: Our work or your guns. You can choose either; you can’t have both. We do not initiate the use of force against others or submit to force at their hands. If you desire ever again to live in an industrial society, it Will be on our moral terms. Our terms and our motive power are the antithesis of yours. You have been using fear as your weapon and have been bringing death to man as his punishment for rejecting your morality. We offer him life as his reward for accepting ours.
“You who are worshippers of the zero-you have never discovered that achieving life is not the equivalent of avoiding death. Joy is not ‘the absence of pain,’ intelligence is not ‘the absence of stupidity,’ light is not ‘the absence of darkness,’ an entity is not ‘the absence of a nonentity.’ Building is not done by abstaining from demolition; centuries of sitting and waiting in such abstinence will not raise one single girder for you to abstain from demolishing-and now you can no longer say to me, the builder: ‘Produce, and feed us in exchange for our not destroying your production.’ I am answering in the name of all your victims: Perish with and in your own void. Existence is not a negation of negatives. Evil, not value, is an absence and a negation, evil is impotent and has no power but that which we let it extort from us. Perish, because we have learned that a zero cannot hold a mortgage over life.
“You seek escape from pain. We seek the achievement of happiness. You exist for the sake of avoiding punishment. We exist for the sake of earning rewards. Threats will not make us function; fear is not our incentive. It is not death that we wish to avoid, but life that we wish to live.
“You, who have lost the concept of the difference, you who claim that fear and joy are incentives of equal power-and secretly add that fear is the more ‘practical’-you do not wish to live, and only fear of death still holds you to the existence you have damned. You dart in panic through the trap of your days, looking for the exit you have closed, running from a pursuer you dare not name to a terror you dare not acknowledge, and the greater your terror the greater your dread of the only act that could save you: thinking. The purpose of your struggle is not to know, not to grasp or name or hear the thing. I shall now state to your hearing: that yours is the Morality of Death.
“Death is the standard of your values, death is your chosen goal, and you have to keep running, since there is no escape from the pursuer who is out to destroy you or from the knowledge that that pursuer is yourself. Stop running, for once-there is no place to run-stand naked, as you dread to stand, but as I see you, and take a look at what you dared to call a moral code.
“Damnation is the start of your morality, destruction is its purpose, means and end. Your code begins by damning man as evil, then demands that he practice a good which it defines as impossible for him to practice. It demands, as his first proof of virtue, that he accept his own depravity without proof. It demands that he start, not with a standard of value, but with a standard of evil, which is himself, by means of which he is then to define the good: the good is that which he is not.
“It does not matter who then becomes the profiteer on his renounced glory and tormented soul, a mystic God with some incomprehensible design or any passer-by whose rotting sores are held as some inexplicable claim upon him-it does not matter, the good is not for him to understand, his duty is to crawl through years of penance, atoning for the guilt of his existence to any stray collector of unintelligible debts, his only concept of a value is a zero: the good is that which is non-man.
“The name of this monstrous absurdity is Original Sin.
“A sin without volition is a slap at morality and an insolent contradiction in terms: that which is outside the possibility of choice is outside the province of morality. If man is evil by birth, he has no will, no power to change it; if he has no will, he can be neither good nor evil; a robot is amoral. To hold, as man’s sin, a fact not open to his choice is a mockery of morality. To hold man’s nature as his sin is a mockery of nature. To punish him for a crime he committed before he was born is a mockery of justice. To hold him guilty in a matter where no innocence exists is a mockery of reason. To destroy morality, nature, justice and reason by means of a single concept is a feat of evil hardly to be matched. Yet that is the root of your code.
“Do not hide behind the cowardly evasion that man is born with free will, but with a ‘tendency’ to evil. A free will saddled with a tendency is like a game with loaded dice. It forces man to struggle through the effort of playing, to bear responsibility and pay for the game, but the decision is weighted in favor of a tendency that he had no power to escape. If the tendency is of his choice, he cannot possess it at birth; if it is not of his choice, his will is not free.
“What is the nature of the guilt that your teachers call his Original Sin? What are the evils man acquired when he fell from a state they consider perfection? Their myth declares that he ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge-he acquired a mind and became a rational being. It was the knowledge of good and evil-he became a mortal being. He was sentenced to earn his bread by his labor-he became a productive being. He was sentenced to experience desire-he acquired the capacity of sexual enjoyment. The evils for which they damn him are reason, morality, creativeness; joy-all the cardinal values of his existence. It is not his vices that their myth of man’s fall is designed to explain and condemn, it is not his errors that they hold as his guilt, but the essence of his nature as man. Whatever he was-that robot in the Garden of Eden, who existed without mind, without values, without labor, without love-he was not man.
“Man’s fall, according to your teachers, was that he gained the virtues required to live. These virtues, by their standard, are his Sin. His evil, they charge, is that he’s man. His guilt, they charge, is that he lives.
“They call it a morality of mercy and a doctrine of love for man. No, they say, they do not preach that man is evil, the evil is only that alien object: his body. No, they say, they do not wish to kill him, they only wish to make him lose his body. They seek to help him, they say, against his pain-and they point at the torture rack to which they’ve tied him, the rack with two wheels that pull him in opposite directions, the rack of the doctrine that splits his soul and body.
“They have cut man in two, setting one half against the other. They have taught him that his body and his consciousness are two enemies engaged in deadly conflict, two antagonists of opposite natures, contradictory claims, incompatible needs, that to benefit one is to injure the other, that his soul belongs to a supernatural realm, but his body is an evil prison holding it in bondage to this earth-and that the good is to defeat his body, to undermine it by years of patient struggle, digging his way to that gorgeous jail-break which leads into the freedom of the grave.
“They have taught man that he is a hopeless misfit made of two elements, both symbols of death. A body without a soul is a corpse, a soul without a body is a ghost-yet such is their image of man’s nature: the battleground of a struggle between a corpse and a ghost, a corpse endowed with some evil volition of its own and a ghost endowed with the knowledge that everything known to man is nonexistent, that only the unknowable exists.
“Do you observe what human faculty that’ doctrine was designed to ignore? It was man’s mind that had to be negated in order to make him fall apart. Once he surrendered reason, he was left at the mercy of two monsters whom he could not fathom or control: of a body moved by unaccountable instincts and of a soul moved by mystic revelations-he was left as the passively ravaged victim of a battle between a robot and a dictaphone.
“And as he now crawls through the wreckage, groping blindly for a way to live, your teachers offer him the help of a morality that proclaims that he’ll find no solution and must seek no fulfillment on earth. Real existence, they tell him, is that which he cannot perceive, true consciousness is the faculty of perceiving the non-existent-and if he is unable to understand it, that is the proof that his existence is evil and his consciousness impotent.
“As products of the split between man’s soul and body, there are two kinds of teachers of the Morality of Death: the mystics of spirit and the mystics of muscle, whom you call the spiritualists and the materialists, those who believe in consciousness without existence and those who believe in existence without consciousness. Both demand the surrender of your mind, one to their revelation, the other to their reflexes. No matter how loudly they posture in the roles of irreconcilable antagonists, their moral codes are alike, and so are their aims: in matter-the enslavement of man’s body, in spirit-the destruction of his mind.
“The good, say the mystics of spirit, is God, a being whose only definition is that he is beyond man’s power to conceive-a definition that invalidates man’s consciousness and nullifies his concepts of existence. The good, say the mystics of muscle, is Society-a thing which they define as an organism that possesses no physical form, a super-being embodied in no one in particular and everyone in general except yourself. Man’s mind, say the mystics of spirit, must be subordinated to the will of God. Man’s mind, say the mystics of muscle, must be subordinated to the will of Society. Man’s standard of value say the mystics of spirit, is the pleasure 0f God, whose standards are beyond man’s power of comprehension and must be accepted on faith. Man’s standard of value, say the mystics of muscle, is the pleasure of Society, whose standards are beyond man’s right of judgment and must be obeyed as a primary absolute. The purpose of man’s life, say both, is to become an abject zombie who serves a purpose he does not know, for reasons he is not to question. His reward, say the mystics of spirit, will be given to him beyond the grave. His reward, say the mystics of muscle, will be given on earth-to his great-grandchildren.
“Selfishness-say both-is man’s evil. Man’s good-say both-is to give up his personal desires, to deny himself, renounce himself, surrender; man’s good is to negate the life he lives. Sacrifice-cry both-is the essence of morality, the highest virtue within man’s reach.
“Whoever is now within reach of my voice, whoever is man the victim, not man the killer, I am speaking at the deathbed of your mind, at the brink of that darkness in which you’re drowning, and if there still remains within you the power to struggle to hold on to those fading sparks which had been yourself-use it now. The word that has destroyed you is ’sacrifice.’ Use the last of your strength to understand its meaning. You’re still alive. You have a chance.
“‘Sacrifice’ does not mean the rejection of the worthless, but of the precious. ‘Sacrifice’ does not mean the rejection of the evil for the sake of the good, but of the good for the sake of the evil. ‘Sacrifice’ is the surrender of that which you value in favor of that which you don’t.
“If you exchange a penny for a dollar, it is not a sacrifice; if you exchange a dollar for a penny, it is. If you achieve the career you wanted, after years of struggle, it is not a sacrifice; if you then renounce it for the sake of a rival, it is. If you own a bottle of milk and gave it to your starving child, it is not a sacrifice; if you give it to your neighbor’s child and let your own die, it is.
“If you give money to help a friend, it is not a sacrifice; if you give it to a worthless stranger, it is. If you give your friend a sum you can afford, it is not a sacrifice; if you give him money at the cost of your own discomfort, it is only a partial virtue, according to this sort of moral standard; if you give him money at the cost of disaster to yourself that is the virtue of sacrifice in full.
“If you renounce all personal desire and dedicate your life to those you love, you do not achieve full virtue: you still retain a value of your own, which is your love. If you devote your life to random strangers, it is an act of greater virtue. If you devote your life to serving men you hate-that is the greatest of the virtues you can practice.
“A sacrifice is the surrender of a value. Full sacrifice is full surrender of all values. If you wish to achieve full virtue, you must seek no gratitude in return for your sacrifice, no praise, no love, no admiration, no self-esteem, not even the pride of being virtuous; the faintest trace of any gain dilutes your virtue. If you pursue a course of action that does not taint your life by any joy, that brings you no value in matter, no value in spirit, no gain, no profit, no reward-if you achieve this state of total zero, you have achieved the ideal of moral perfection.
“You are told that moral perfection is impossible to man-and, by this standard, it is. You cannot achieve it so long as you live, but the value of your life and of your person is gauged by how closely you succeed in approaching that ideal zero which is death.
“If you start, however, as a passionless blank, as a vegetable seeking to be eaten, with no values to reject and no wishes to renounce, you will not win the crown of sacrifice. It is not a sacrifice to renounce the unwanted. It is not a sacrifice. It is not a sacrifice to give your life for others, if death is your personal desire. To achieve the virtue of sacrifice, you must want to live, you must love it, you must burn with passion for this earth and for all the splendor it can give you-you must feel the twist of every knife as it slashes your desires away from your reach and drains your love out of your body, It is not mere death that the morality of sacrifice holds out to you as an ideal, but death by slow torture.
“Do not remind me that it pertains only to this life on earth. I am concerned with no other. Neither are you.
“If you wish to save the last of your dignity, do not call your best actions a ’sacrifice’: that term brands you as immoral. If a mother buys food for her hungry child rather than a hat for herself, it is not a sacrifice: she values the child higher than the hat; but it is a sacrifice to the kind of mother whose higher value is the hat, who would prefer her child to starve and feeds him only from a sense of duty. If a man dies fighting for his own freedom, it is not a sacrifice: he is not willing to live as a slave; but it is a sacrifice to the kind of man who’s willing. If a man refuses to sell his convictions, it is not a sacrifice, unless he is the sort of man who has no convictions.
“Sacrifice could be proper only for those who have nothing to sacrifice-no values, no standards, no judgment-those whose desires are irrational whims, blindly conceived and lightly surrendered. For a man of moral stature, whose desires are born of rational values, sacrifice is the surrender of the right to the wrong, of the good to the evil.
“The creed of sacrifice is a morality for the immoral-a morality that declares its own bankruptcy by confessing that it can’t impart to men any personal stake in virtues or value, and that their souls are sewers of depravity, which they must be taught to sacrifice. By his own confession, it is impotent to teach men to be good and can only subject them to constant punishment.
“Are you thinking, in some foggy stupor, that it’s only material values that your morality requires you to sacrifice? And what do you think are material values? Matter has no value except as a means for the satisfaction of human desires. Matter is only a tool of human values. To what service are you asked to give the material tools your virtue has produced? To the service of that which you regard as evil: to a principle you do not share, to a person you do not respect, to the achievement of a purpose opposed to your own-else your gift is not a sacrifice.
“Your morality tells you to renounce the material world and to divorce your values from matter. A man whose values are given no expression in material form, whose existence is unrelated to his ideals, whose actions contradict his convictions, is a cheap little hypocrite-yet that is the man who obeys your morality and divorces his values from matter. The man who loves one woman, but sleeps with another-the man who admires the talent of a worker, but hires another-the man who considers one cause to be just, but donates his money to the support of another-the man who holds high standards of craftsmanship, but devotes his effort to the production of trash-these are the men who have renounced matter, the men who believe that the values of their spirit cannot be brought into material reality.
“Do you say it is the spirit that such men have renounced? Yes, of course. You cannot have one without the other. You are an indivisible entity of matter and consciousness. Renounce your consciousness and you become a brute. Renounce your body and you become a fake. Renounce the material world and you surrender it to evil.
“And that is precisely the goal of your morality, the duty that your code demands of you. Give to that which you do not enjoy, serve that which you do not admire, submit to that which you consider evil-surrender the world to the values of others, deny, reject, renounce your self. Your self is your mind; renounce it and you become a chunk of meat ready for any cannibal to swallow.
“It is your mind that they want you to surrender-all those who preach the creed of sacrifice, whatever their tags or their motives, whether they demand it for the sake of your soul or of your body, whether they promise you another life in heaven or a full stomach on this earth. Those who start by saying: ‘It is selfish to pursue your own wishes, you must sacrifice them to the wishes of others’-end up by saying: ‘It is selfish to uphold your convictions, you must sacrifice them to the convictions of others.
“This much is true: the most selfish of all things is the independent mind that recognizes no authority higher than its own and no value higher than its judgment of truth. You are asked to sacrifice your intellectual integrity, your logic, your reason, your standard of truth-in favor of becoming a prostitute whose standard is the greatest good for the greatest number.
“If you search your code for guidance, for an answer to the question: ‘What is the good?’-the only answer you will find is ‘The good of others.’ The good is whatever others wish, whatever you feel they feel they wish, or whatever you feel they ought to feel. ‘The good of others’ is a magic formula that transforms anything into gold, a formula to be recited as a guarantee of moral glory and as a fumigator for any action, even the slaughter of a continent. Your standard of virtue is not an object, not an act, not a principle, but an intention. You need no proof, no reasons, no success, you need not achieve in fact the good of others-all you need to know is that your motive was the good of others, not your own. Your only definition of the good is a negation: the good is the ‘non-good for me.’
“Your code-which boasts that it upholds eternal, absolute, objective moral values and scorns the conditional, the relative and the subjective-your code hands out, as its version of the absolute, the following rule of moral conduct: If you wish it, it’s evil; if others wish it, it’s good; if the motive of your action is your welfare, don’t do it; if the motive is the welfare of others, then anything goes.
“As this double-jointed, double-standard morality splits you in half, so it splits mankind into two enemy camps: one is you, the other is all the rest of humanity. You are the only outcast who has no right to wish to live. You are the only servant, the rest are the masters, you are the only giver, the rest are the takers, you are the eternal debtor, the rest are the creditors never to be paid off. You must not question their right to your sacrifice, or the nature of their wishes and their needs: their right is conferred upon them by a negative, by the fact that they are ‘non-you.’
“For those of you who might ask questions, your code provides a consolation prize and booby-trap: it is for your own happiness, it says, that you must serve the happiness of others, the only way to achieve your joy is to give it up to others, the only way to achieve your prosperity is to surrender your wealth to others, the only way to protect your life is to protect all men except yourself-and if you find no joy in this procedure, it is your own fault and the proof of your evil; if you were good, you would find your happiness in providing a banquet for others, and your dignity in existing on such crumbs as they might care to toss you.
“You who have no standard of self-esteem, accept the guilt and dare not ask the questions. But you know the unadmitted answer, refusing to acknowledge what you see, what hidden premise moves your world. You know it, not in honest statement, but as a dark uneasiness within you, while you flounder between guilty cheating and grudgingly practicing a principle too vicious to name.
“I, who do not accept the unearned, neither in values nor in guilt, am here to ask the questions you evaded. Why is it moral to serve the happiness of others, but not your own? If enjoyment is a value, why is it moral when experienced by others, but immoral when experienced by you? If the sensation of eating a cake is a value, why is it an immoral indulgence in your stomach, but a moral goal for you to achieve in the stomach of others? Why is it immoral for you to desire, but moral for others to do so? Why is it immoral to produce a value and keep it, but moral to give it away? And if it is not moral for you to keep a value, why is it moral for others to accept it? If you are selfless and virtuous when you give it, are they not selfish and vicious when they take it? Does virtue consist of serving vice? Is the moral purpose of those who are good, self-immolation for the sake of those who are evil?
“The answer you evade, the monstrous answer is: No, the takers are not evil, provided they did not earn the value you gave them. It is not immoral for them to accept it, provided they are unable to produce it, unable to deserve it, unable to give you any value in return. It is not immoral for them to enjoy it, provided they do not obtain it by right.
“Such is the secret core of your creed, the other half of your double standard: it is immoral to live by your own effort, but moral to live by the effort of others-it is immoral to consume your own product, but moral to consume the products of others-it is immoral to earn, but moral to mooch-it is the parasites who are the moral justification for the existence of the producers, but the existence of the parasites is an end in itself-it is evil to profit by achievement, but good to profit by sacrifice-it is evil to create your own happiness, but good to enjoy it at the price of the blood of others.
“Your code divides mankind into two castes and commands them to live by opposite rules: those who may desire anything and those who may desire nothing, the chosen and the demand, the riders and the carriers, the eaters and the eaten. What standard determines your caste? What passkey admits you to the moral elite? The passkey is lack of value.
“Whatever the value involved, it is your lack of it that gives you a claim upon those who don’t lack it. It is your need that gives you a claim to rewards. If you are able to satisfy your need, your ability annuls your right to satisfy it. But a need you are unable to satisfy gives you first right to the lives of mankind.
“If you succeed, any man who fails is your master; if you fail, any man who succeeds is your serf. Whether your failure is just or not, whether your wishes are rational or not, whether your misfortune is undeserved or the result of your vices, it is misfortune that gives you a right to rewards. It is pain, regardless of its nature or cause, pain as a primary absolute, that gives you a mortgage on all of existence.
“If you heal your pain by your own effort, you receive no moral credit: your code regards it scornfully as an act of self-interest. Whatever value you seek to acquire, be it wealth or food or love or rights, if you acquire it by means of your Virtue, your code does not regard it as a moral acquisition: you occasion no loss to anyone, it is a trade, not alms; a payment, not a sacrifice. The deserved belongs in the selfish, commercial realm of mutual profit; it is only the undeserved that calls for that moral transaction which consists of profit to one at the price of disaster to the other. To demand rewards for your virtue is selfish and immoral; it is your lack of virtue that transforms your demand into a moral right.
“A morality that holds need as a claim, holds emptiness-non-existence-as its standard of value; it rewards an absence, a defeat: weakness, inability, incompetence, suffering, disease, disaster, the lack, the fault, the flaw-the zero.
“Who provides the account to pay these claims? Those who are cursed for being non-zeros, each to the extent of his distance from that ideal. Since all values are the product of virtues, the degree of your virtue is used as the measure of your penalty; the degree of your faults is used as the measure of your gain. Your code declares that the rational man must sacrifice himself to the irrational, the independent man to parasites, the honest man to the dishonest, the man of justice to the unjust, the productive man to thieving loafers, the man of integrity to compromising knaves, the man of self-esteem to sniveling neurotics. Do you wonder at the meanness of soul in those you see around you? The man who achieves these virtues will not accept your moral code; the man who accepts your moral code will not achieve these virtues.
“Under a morality of sacrifice, the first value you sacrifice is morality; the next is self-esteem. When need is the standard, every man is both victim and parasite. As a victim, he must labor to fill the needs of others, leaving himself in the position of a parasite whose needs must be filled by others. He cannot approach his fellow men except in one of two disgraceful roles: he is both a beggar and a sucker.
“You fear the man who has a dollar less than you, that dollar is rightfully his, he makes you feel like a moral defrauder. You hate the man who has a dollar more than you, that dollar is rightfully yours, he makes you feel that you are morally defrauded. The man below is a source of, your guilt, the man above is a source of your frustration. You do not know what to surrender or demand, when to give and when to grab, what pleasure in life is rightfully yours and what debt is still unpaid to others-you struggle to evade, as ‘theory,’ the knowledge that by the moral standard you’ve accepted you are guilty every moment of your life, there is no mouthful of food you swallow that is not needed by someone somewhere on earth-and you give up the problem in blind resentment, you conclude that moral perfection is not to be achieved or desired, that you will muddle through by snatching as snatch can and by avoiding the eyes of the young, of those who look at you as if self-esteem were possible and they expected you to have it. Guilt is all that you retain within your soul-and so does every other man, as he goes past, avoiding your eyes. Do you wonder why your morality has not achieved brotherhood on earth or the good will of man to man?
“The justification of sacrifice, that your morality propounds, is more corrupt than the corruption it purports to justify. The motive of your sacrifice, it tells you, should be love-the love you ought to feel for every man. A morality that professes the belief that the values of the spirit are more precious than matter, a morality that teaches you to scorn a whore who gives her body indiscriminately to all men-this same morality demands that you surrender your soul to promiscuous love for all comers.
“As there can be no causeless wealth, so there can be no causeless love or any sort of causeless emotion. An emotion is a response to a face of reality, an estimate dictated by your standards. To love is to value. The man who tells you that it is possible to value without values, to love those whom you appraise as worthless, is the man who tells you that it is possible to grow rich by consuming without producing and that paper money is as valuable as gold.
“Observe that he does not expect you to feel a causeless fear. When his kind get into power, they are expert at contriving means of terror, at giving you ample cause to feel the fear by which they desire to rule you. But when it comes to love, the highest of emotions, you permit them to shriek at you accusingly that you are a moral delinquent if you’re incapable of feeling causeless love. When a man feels fear without reason, you call him to the attention of a psychiatrist; you are not so careful to protect the meaning, the nature and the dignity of love.
“Love is the expression of one’s values, the greatest reward you can earn for the moral qualities you have achieved in your character and person, the emotional price paid by one man for the joy he receives from the virtues of another. Your morality demands that you divorce your love from values and hand it down to any vagrant, not as response to his worth, but as response to his need, not as reward, but as alms, not as a payment for virtues, but as a blank check on vices. Your morality tells you that the purpose of love is to set you free of the bonds of morality, that love is superior to moral judgment, that true love transcends, forgives and survives every manner of evil in its object, and the greater the love the greater the depravity it permits to the loved. To love a man for his virtues is paltry and human, it tells you; to love him for his flaws is divine. To love those who are worthy of it is self-interest; to love the unworthy is sacrifice. You owe your love to those who don’t deserve it, and the less they deserve it, the more love you owe them-the more loathsome the object, the nobler your love-the more unfastidious your love, the greater the virtue-and if you can bring your soul to the state of a dump heap that welcomes anything on equal terms, if you can cease to value moral values, you have achieved the state of moral perfection.
“Such is your morality of sacrifice and such are the twin ideals it offers: to refashion the life of your body in the image of a human stockyard, and the life of your spirit in the image of a dump.
“Such was your goal-and you’ve reached it. Why do you now moan complaints about man’s impotence and the futility of human aspirations? Because you were unable to prosper by seeking destruction? Because you were unable to find joy by worshipping pain? Because you were unable to live by holding death as your standard of value?
“The degree of your ability to live was the degree to which you broke your moral code, yet you believe that those who preach it are friends of humanity, you damn yourself and dare not question their motives or their goals. Take a look at them now, when you face your last choice-and if you choose to perish, do so with full knowledge of how cheaply so small an enemy has claimed your life.
“The mystics of both schools, who preach the creed of sacrifice, are germs that attack you through a single sore: your fear of relying on your mind. They tell you that they possess a means of knowledge higher than the mind, a mode of consciousness superior to reason-like a special pull with some bureaucrat of the universe who gives them secret tips withheld from others. The mystics of spirit declare that they possess an extra sense you lack: this special sixth sense consists of contradicting the whole of the knowledge of your five. The mystics of muscle do not bother to assert any claim to extrasensory perception: they merely declare that your senses are not valid, and that their wisdom consists of perceiving your blindness by some manner of unspecified means. Both kinds demand that you invalidate your own consciousness and surrender yourself into their power. They offer you, as proof of their superior knowledge, the fact that they assert the opposite of everything you know, and as proof of their superior ability to deal with existence, the fact that they lead you to misery, self-sacrifice, starvation, destruction.
“They claim that they perceive a mode of being superior to your existence on this earth. The mystics of spirit call it ‘another dimension,’ which consists of denying dimensions. The mystics of muscle call it ‘the future,’ which consists of denying the present. To exist is to possess identity. What identity are they able to give to their superior realm? They keep telling you what it is not, but never tell you what it is. All their identifications consist of negating: God is that which no human mind can know, they say-and proceed to demand that you consider it knowledge-God is non-man, heaven is non-earth, soul is non-body, virtue ‘is non-profit, A is non-A, perception is non-sensory, knowledge is non-reason. Their definitions are not acts of defining, but of wiping out.
“It is only the metaphysics of a leech that would cling to the idea of a universe where a zero is a standard of identification. A leech would want to seek escape from the necessity to name its own nature-escape from the necessity to know that the substance on which it builds its private universe is blood.
“What is the nature of that superior world to which they sacrifice the world that exists? The mystics of spirit curse matter, the mystics of muscle curse profit the first wish men to profit by renouncing the earth, the second wish men to inherit the earth by renouncing all profit. Their non-material, non-profit worlds are realms where rivers run with milk and coffee, where wine spurts from rocks at their command, where pastry drops on them from clouds at the price of opening their mouth. On this material, profit-chasing earth, an enormous investment of virtue-of intelligence, integrity, energy, skill-is required to construct a railroad to carry them the distance of one mile; in their non-material, non-profit world, they travel from planet to planet at the cost of a wish. If an honest person asks them: ‘How?’-they answer with righteous scorn that a ‘how’ is the concept of vulgar realists; the concept of superior spirits is ‘Somehow.’ On this earth restricted by matter and profit, rewards are achieved by thought; in a world set free of such restrictions, rewards are achieved by wishing.
“And that is the whole of their shabby secret. The secret of all their esoteric philosophies, of all their dialectics and super-senses, of their evasive eyes and snarling words, the secret for which they destroy civilization, language, industries and lives, the secret for which they pierce their own eyes and eardrums, grind out their senses, blank out their minds, the purpose for which they dissolve the absolutes of reason, logic, matter, existence, reality-is to erect upon that plastic fog a single holy absolute: their Wish.
“The restriction they seek to escape is the law of identity. The freedom they seek is freedom from the fact that an A will remain an A, no matter what their tears or tantrums-that a river will not bring them milk, no matter what their hunger-that water will not run uphill, no matter what comforts they could gain if it did, and if they want to lift it to the roof of a skyscraper, they must do it by a process of thought and labor, in which the nature of an inch of pipe line counts, but their feelings do not-that their feelings are impotent to alter the course of a single speck of dust in space or the nature of any action they have committed.
“Those who tell you that man is unable to perceive a reality undistorted by his senses, mean that they are unwilling to perceive a reality undistorted by their feelings. ‘Things as they are’ are things as perceived by your mind; divorce them from reason and they become ‘things as perceived by your wishes.’
“There is no honest revolt against reason-and when you accept any part of their creed, your motive is to get away with something your reason would not permit you to attempt. The freedom you seek is freedom from the fact that if you stole your wealth, you are a scoundrel, no matter how much you give to charity or how many prayers you recite-that if you sleep with sluts, you’re not a worthy husband, no matter how anxiously you feel that you love our wife next morning-that you are an entity, not a series of random pieces scattered through a universe where nothing sticks and nothing commits you to anything, the universe of a child’s nightmare where identities switch and swim, where the rotter and the hero are interchangeable parts arbitrarily assumed at will-that you are a man-that you are an entity-that you are.
“No matter how eagerly you claim that the goal of your mystic wishing is a higher mode of life, the rebellion against identity is the wish for non-existence. The desire not to be anything is the desire not to be.
“Your teachers, the mystics of both schools, have reversed causality in their consciousness, then strive to reverse it in existence. They take their emotions as a cause, and their mind as a passive effect. They make their emotions their tool for perceiving reality. They hold their desires as an irreducible primary, as a fact superseding all facts. An honest man does not desire until he has identified the object of his desire. He says: ‘It is, therefore I want it.’ They say: ‘I want it, therefore it is.’
“They want to cheat the axiom of existence and consciousness, they want their consciousness to be an instrument not of perceiving but of creating existence, and existence to be not the object but the subject of their consciousness-they want to be that God they created in their image and likeness, who creates a universe out of a void by means of an arbitrary whim. But reality is not to be cheated. What they achieve is the opposite of their desire. They want an omnipotent power over existence; instead, they lose the power of the consciousness. By refusing to know, they condemn themselves to the horror of a perpetual unknown.
“Those irrational wishes that draw you to their creed, those emotions you worship as an idol, on whose altar you sacrifice the earth, that dark, incoherent passion within you, which you take as the voice of God or of your glands, is nothing more than the corpse of your mind. An emotion that clashes with your reason, an emotion that you cannot explain or control, is only the carcass of that stale thinking which you forbade your mind to revise.
“Whenever you committed the evil of refusing to think and to see, of exempting from the absolute of reality some one small wish of yours, whenever you chose to say: Let me withdraw from the judgment of reason the cookies I stole, or the existence of God, let me have my one irrational whim and I will be a man of reason about all else-that was the act of subverting your consciousness, the act of corrupting your mind. Your mind then became a fixed jury who takes orders from a secret underworld, whose verdict distorts the evidence to fit an absolute it dares not touch-and a censored reality is the result, a splintered reality where the bits you chose to see are floating among the chasms of those you didn’t, held together by that embalming fluid of the mind which is an emotion exempted from thought.
“The links you strive to drown are casual connections. The enemy you seek to defeat is the law of causality: it permits you no miracles. The law of causality is the law of identity applied to action. All actions are caused by entities. The nature of an action is caused and determined by the nature of the entities that act; a thing cannot act in contradiction to its nature. An action not caused by an entity would be caused by a zero, which would mean a zero controlling a thing, a non-entity controlling an entity, the non-existent ruling the existent-which is the universe of your teachers’ desire, the cause of their doctrines of causeless action, the reason of their revolt against reason, the goal of their morality, their politics, their economics, the ideal they strive for: the reign of the zero.
“The law of identity does not permit you to have your cake and eat it, too. The law of causality does not permit you to eat your cake before you have it. But if you drown both laws in the blanks of your mind, if you pretend to yourself and to others that you don’t see-then you can try to proclaim your right to eat your cake today and mine tomorrow, you can preach that the way to have a cake is to eat it first, before you bake it, that the way to produce is to start by consuming, that all wishers have an equal claim to all things, since nothing is caused by anything. The corollary of the causeless in matter is the unearned in spirit.
“Whenever you rebel against causality, your motive is the fraudulent desire, not to escape it, but worse: to reverse it. You want unearned love, as if love, the effect, could give you personal value, the cause-you want unearned admiration, as if admiration, the effect, could give you virtue, the cause-you want unearned wealth, as if wealth, the effect, could give you ability, the cause-you plead for mercy, mercy, not justice, as if an unearned forgiveness could wipe out the cause of your plea. And to indulge your ugly little shams, you support the doctrines of your teachers, while they run hog-wild proclaiming that spending, the effect, creates riches, the cause, that machinery, the effect, creates intelligence, the cause, that your sexual desires, the effect, create your philosophical values, the cause.
“Who pays for the orgy? Who causes the causeless? Who are the victims, condemned to remain unacknowledged and to perish in silence, lest their agony disturb your pretense that they do not exist? We are, we, the men of the mind.
“We are the cause of all the values that you covet, we who perform the process of thinking, which is the process of defining identity and discovering causal connections. We taught you to know, to speak, to produce, to desire, to love. You who abandon reason-were it not for us who preserve it, you would not be able to fulfill or even to conceive your wishes. You would not be able to desire the clothes that had not been made, the automobile that had not been invented, the money that had not been devised, as exchange for goods that did not exist, the admiration that had not been experienced for men who had achieved nothing, the love that belongs and pertains only to those who preserve their capacity to think, to choose, to value.
“You-who leap like a savage out of the jungle of your feelings to the Fifth Avenue of our New York and proclaim that you want to keep the electric lights, but to destroy the generators-it is our wealth that you use while destroying us, it is our values that you use while damning us, it is our language that you use while denying the mind.
“Just as your mystics of spirit invented their heaven in the image of our earth, omitting our existence, and promised you rewards created by miracle out of non-matter-so your modern mystics of muscle omit our existence and promise you a heaven where matter shapes itself of its own causeless will into all the rewards desired by your non-mind.
“For centuries, the mystics of spirit had existed by running a protection racket-by making life on earth unbearable, then charging you for consolation and relief, by forbidding all the virtues that make existence possible, then riding on the shoulders of your guilt, by declaring production and joy to be sins, then collecting blackmail from the sinners. We, the men of the mind, were the unnamed victims of their creed, we who were willing to break their moral code and to bear damnation for the sin of reason-we who thought and acted, while they wished and prayed-we who were moral outcasts, we who were bootleggers of life when life was held to be a crime-while they basked in moral glory for the virtue of surpassing material greed and of distributing in selfless charity the material goods produced by-blank-out.
“Now we are chained and commanded to produce by savages who do not grant us even the identification of sinners-by savages who proclaim that we do not exist, then threaten to deprive us of the life we don’t possess, if we fail to provide them with the goods we don’t produce. Now we are expected to continue running railroads and to know the minute when a train will arrive after crossing the span of a continent, we are expected to continue running steel mills and to know the molecular structure of every drop of metal in the cables of your bridges and in the body of the airplanes that support you in mid-air-while the tribes of your grotesque little mystics of muscle fight over the carcass of our world, gibbering in sounds of non-language that there are no principles, no absolutes, no knowledge, no mind.
“Dropping below the level of a savage, who believes that the magic words he utters have the power to alter reality, they believe that reality can be altered by the power of the words they do not utter-and their magic tool is the blank-out, the pretense that nothing can come into existence past the voodoo of their refusal to identify it.
“As they feed on stolen wealth in body, so they feed on stolen concepts in mind, and proclaim that honesty consists of refusing to know that one is stealing. As they use effects while denying causes, so they use our concepts while denying the roots and the existence of the concepts they are using. As they seek, not to build, but to take over industrial plants, so they seek, not to think, but to take over human thinking.
“As they proclaim that the only requirement for running a factory is the ability to turn the cranks of the machines, and blank out the question of who created the factory-so they proclaim that there are no entities, that nothing exists but motion, and blank out the fact that motion presupposes the thing which moves, that without the concept of entity, there can be no such concept as ‘motion.’ As they proclaim their right to consume the unearned, and blank out the question of who’s to produce it-so they proclaim that there is no law of identity, that nothing exists but change, and blank out the fact that change presupposes the concepts of what changes, from what and to what, that, without the law of identity no such concept as ‘change’ is possible. As they rob an industrialist while denying his value, so they seek to seize power over all of existence while denying that existence exists.
“‘We know that we know nothing,’ they chatter, blanking out the fact that they are claiming knowledge-’There are not absolutes,’ they chatter, blanking out the fact that they are uttering an absolute-’You cannot prove that you exist or that you’re conscious,’ they chatter, blanking out the fact that proof presupposes existence, consciousness and a complex chain of knowledge: the existence of something to know, of a consciousness able to know it, and of a knowledge that has learned to distinguish between such concepts as the proved and the unproved.
“When a savage who has not learned to speak declares that existence must be proved, he is asking you to prove it by means of non-existence-when he declares that your consciousness must be proved, he is asking you to prove it by means of unconsciousness-he is asking you to step into a void outside of existence and consciousness to give him proof of both-he is asking you to become a zero gaining knowledge about a zero.
“When he declares that an axiom is a matter of arbitrary choice and he doesn’t choose to accept the axiom that he exists, he blanks out the fact that he has accepted it by uttering that sentence, that the only way to reject it is to shut one’s mouth, expound no theories and die.
“An axiom is a statement that identifies the base of knowledge and of any further statement pertaining to that knowledge, a statement necessarily contained in all others, whether any particular speaker chooses to identify it or not. An axiom is a proposition that defeats its opponents by the fact that they have to accept it and use it in the process of any attempt to deny it. Let the caveman who does not choose to accept the axiom of identity, try to present his theory without using the concept of identity or any concept derived from it-let the anthropoid who does not choose to accept the existence of nouns, try to devise a language without nouns, adjectives or verbs-let the witch-doctor who does not choose to accept the validity of sensory perception, try to prove it without using the data he obtained by sensory perception-let the head-hunter who does not choose to accept the validity of logic, try to prove it without using logic-let the pigmy who proclaims that a skyscraper needs no foundation after it reaches its fiftieth story, yank the base from under his building, not yours-let the cannibal who snarls that the freedom of man’s mind was needed to create an industrial civilization, but is not needed to maintain it, be given an arrowhead and bearskin, not a university chair of economics.
“Do you think they are taking you back to dark ages? They are taking you back to darker ages than any your history has known. Their goal is not the era of pre-science, but the era of pre-language. Their purpose is to deprive you of the concept on which man’s mind, his life and his culture depend: the concept of an objective reality. Identify the development of a human consciousness-and you will know the purpose of their creed.
“A savage is a being who has not grasped that A is A and that reality is real. He has arrested his mind at the level of a baby’s, at the state when a consciousness acquires its initial sensory perception and has not learned to distinguish solid objects. It is to a baby that the world appears as a blur of motion, without things that move-and the birth of his mind is the day when he grasps that the streak that keeps flickering past him is his mother and the whirl beyond her is a curtain, that the two are solid entities and neither can turn into the other, that they are what they are, that they exist. The day when he grasps that matter has no volition is the day when he grasps that he has-and this is his birth as a human being. The day when he grasps that the reflection he sees in a mirror is not a delusion, that it is real, but it is not himself, that the mirage he sees in a desert is not a delusion, that the air and the light rays that cause it are real, but it is not a city, it is a city’s reflection-the day when he grasps that he is not a passive recipient of the sensations of any given moment, that his senses do not provide him with automatic knowledge in separate snatches independent of context, but only with the material of knowledge, which his mind must learn to integrate-the day when he grasps that his senses cannot deceive him, that physical objects cannot act without causes, that his organs of perception are physical and have no volition, no power to invent or to distort, that the evidence they give him is an absolute, but his mind must learn to understand it, his mind must discover the nature, the causes, the full context of his sensory material, his mind must identify the things that he perceives-that is the day of his birth as a thinker and scientist.
“We are the men who reach that day; you are the men who choose to reach it partly; a savage is a man who never does.
“To a savage, the world is a place of unintelligible miracles where anything is possible to inanimate matter and nothing is possible to him. His world is not the unknown, but that irrational horror: the unknowable. He believes that physical objects are endowed with a mysterious volition, moved by causeless, unpredictable whims, while he is a helpless pawn at the mercy of forces beyond his control. He believes that nature is ruled by demons who possess an omnipotent power and that reality is their fluid plaything, where they can turn his bowl of meal into a snake and his wife into a beetle at any moment, where the A he has never discovered can be any non-A they choose, where the only knowledge he possesses is that he must not attempt to know. He can count on nothing, he can only wish, and he spends his life on wishing, on begging his demons to grant him his wishes by the arbitrary power of their will, giving them credit when they do, taking the blame when they don’t, offering them sacrifices in token of his gratitude and sacrifices in token of his guilt, crawling on his belly in fear and worship of sun and moon and wind and rain and of any thug who announces himself as their spokesman, provided his words are unintelligible and his mask sufficiently frightening-he wishes, begs and crawls, and dies, leaving you, as a record of his view of existence, the distorted monstrosities of his idols, part-man, part-animal, part-spider, the embodiments of the world of non-A.
“His is the intellectual state of your modern teachers and his is the world to which they want to bring you.
“If you wonder by what means they propose to do it, walk into any college classroom and you will hear your professors teaching your children that man can be certain of nothing, that his consciousness has no validity whatever, that he can learn no facts and no laws of existence, that he’s incapable of knowing an objective reality. What, then, is his standard of knowledge and truth? Whatever others believe, is their answer. There is no knowledge, they teach, there’s only faith: your belief that you exist is an act of faith, no more valid than another’s faith in his right to kill you; the axioms of science are an act of faith, no more valid than a mystic’s faith in revelations; the belief that electric light can be produced by ‘a generator is an act of faith, no more valid than the belief that it can be produced by a rabbit’s foot kissed under a stepladder on the first of the moon-truth is whatever people want it to be, and people are everyone except yourself; reality is whatever people choose to say it is, there are no objective facts, there are only people’s arbitrary wishes-a man who seeks knowledge in a laboratory by means of test tubes and logic is an old-fashioned, superstitious fool; a true scientist is a man who goes around taking public polls-and if it weren’t for the selfish greed of the manufacturers of steel girders, who have a vested interest in obstructing the progress of science, you would learn that New York City does not exist, because a poll of the entire population of the world would tell you by a landslide majority that their beliefs forbid its existence.
“For centuries, the mystics of spirit have proclaimed that faith is superior to reason, but have not dared deny the existence of reason. Their heirs and products, the mystics of muscle, have completed their job and achieved their dream: they proclaim that everything is faith, and call it a revolt against believing. As revolt against unproved assertions, they proclaim that nothing can be proved; as revolt against supernatural knowledge, they proclaim that no knowledge is possible; as-revolt against the enemies of science, they proclaim that science is superstition; as revolt against the enslavement of the mind, they proclaim that there is no mind.
“If you surrender your power to perceive, if you accept the switch of your standard from the objective to the collective and wait for mankind to tell you what to think, you will find another switch taking place before the eyes you have renounced: you will find that your teachers become the rulers of the collective, and if you then refuse to obey them, protesting that they are not the whole of mankind, they will answer: ‘By what means do you know that we are not? Are, brother? Where did you get that old-fashioned term?’
“If you doubt that such is their purpose, observe with what passionate consistency the mystics of muscle are striving to make you forget that a concept such as ‘Mind’ has ever existed. Observe the twists of undefined verbiage, the words with rubber meanings, the terms left floating in midstream, by means of which they try to get around the recognition of the concept of ‘thinking.’ Your consciousness, they tell you, consists of ‘reflexes,’ ‘reactions,’ ‘experiences,’ ‘urges,’ and ‘drives’-and refuse to identify the means by which they acquired that knowledge, to identify the act they are performing when they tell it or the act you are performing when you listen. Words have the power to ‘consider’ you, they say and refuse to identify the reason why words have the power to change your-blank-out. A student reading a book understands it through a process of-blank-out. A scientist working on an invention is engaged in the activity of-blank-out. A psychologist helping a neurotic to solve a problem and untangle a conflict, does it by means of-blank-out. An industrialist-blank-out-there is no such person. A factory is a ‘natural resource,’ like a tree, a rock or a mud puddle.
“The problem of production, they tell you, has been solved and deserves no study or concern; the only problem left for your ‘reflexes’ to solve is now the problem of distribution. Who solved the problem of production? Humanity, they answer. What was the solution? The goods are here. How did they get here? Somehow. What caused it? Nothing has causes.
“They proclaim that every man born is entitled to exist without labor and, the laws of reality to the contrary notwithstanding, is entitled to receive his ‘minimum sustenance’-his food, his clothes, his shelter-with no effort on his part, as his due and his birthright. To receive it-from whom? Blank-out. Every man, they announce, owns an equal share of the technological benefits created in the world. Created-by whom? Blank-out. Frantic cowards who posture as defenders of industrialists now define the purpose of economics as ‘an adjustment between the unlimited desires of men and the goods supplied in limited quantity.’ Supplied-by whom? Blank-out. Intellectual hoodlums who pose as professors, shrug away the thinkers of the past by declaring that their social theories were based on the impractical assumption that man was a rational being-but since men are not rational, they declare, there ought to be established a system that will make it possible for them to exist while being irrational, which means: while defying reality. Who will make it possible? Blank-out. Any stray mediocrity rushes into print with plans to control the production of mankind-and whoever agrees or disagrees with his statistics, no one questions his right to enforce his plans by means of a gun. Enforce-on whom? Blank-out. Random females with causeless incomes titter on trips around the globe and return to deliver the message that the backward peoples of the world demand a higher standard of living. Demand-of whom? Blank-out.
“And to forestall any inquiry into the cause of the difference between a jungle village and New York City, they resort to the ultimate obscenity of explaining man’s industrial progress-skyscrapers, cable bridges, power motors, railroad trains-by declaring that man is an animal who possesses an ‘instinct of tool-making.’
“Did you wonder what is wrong with the world? You are now seeing the climax of the creed of the uncaused and unearned. All your gangs of mystics, of spirit or muscle, are fighting one another for power to rule you, snarling that love is the solution for all the problems of your spirit and that a whip is the solution for all the problems of your body-you who have agreed to have no mind. Granting man less dignity than they grant to cattle, ignoring what an animal trainer could tell them-that no animal can be trained by fear, that a tortured elephant will trample its torturer, but will not work for him or carry his burdens-they expect man to continue to produce electronic tubes, supersonic airplanes, atom-smashing engines and interstellar telescopes, with his ration of meat for reward and a lash on his back for incentive.
“Make no mistake about the character of mystics. To undercut your consciousness has always been their only purpose throughout the ages-and power, the power to rule you by force, has always been their only lust.
“From the rites of the jungle witch-doctors, which distorted reality into grotesque absurdities, stunted the minds of their victims and kept them in terror of the supernatural for stagnant stretches of centuries-to the supernatural doctrines of the Middle Ages, which kept men huddling on the mud floors of their-hovels, in terror that the devil might steal the soup they had worked eighteen hours to earn-to the seedy little smiling professor who assures you that your brain has no capacity to think, that you have no means of perception and must blindly obey the omnipotent will of that supernatural force: Society-all of it is the same performance for the same and only purpose: to reduce you to the kind of pulp that has surrendered the validity of its consciousness.
“But it cannot be done to you without your consent. If you permit it to be done, you deserve it.
“When you listen to a mystic’s harangue on the impotence of the human mind and begin to doubt your consciousness, not his, when you permit your precariously semi-rational state to be shaken by any assertion and decide it is safer to trust his superior certainty and knowledge, the joke is on both of you: your sanction is the only source of certainty he has. The supernatural power that a mystic dreads, the unknowable spirit he worships, the consciousness he considers omnipotent is-yours.
“A mystic is a man who surrendered his mind at its first encounter with the minds of others. Somewhere in the distant reaches of his childhood, when his own understanding of reality clashed with the assertions of others, with their arbitrary orders and contradictory demands, he gave in to so craven a fear of independence that he renounced his rational faculty. At the crossroads of the choice between ‘I know’ and ‘They say,’ he chose the authority of others, he chose to submit rather than to understand, to believe rather than to think. Faith in the supernatural begins as faith in the superiority of others. His surrender took the form of the feeling that he must hide his lack of understanding, that others possess some mysterious knowledge of which he alone is deprived, that reality is whatever they want it to be, through some means forever denied to him.
“From then on, afraid to think, he is left at the mercy of unidentified feelings. His feelings become his only guide, his only remnant of personal identity, he clings to them with ferocious possessiveness-and whatever thinking he does is devoted to the struggle of hiding from himself that the nature of his feelings is terror.
“When a mystic declares that he feels the existence of a power superior to reason, he feels it all right, but that power is not an omniscient super-spirit of the universe, it is the consciousness of any passer-by to whom he has surrendered his own. A mystic is driven by the urge to impress, to cheat, to flatter, to deceive, to force that omnipotent consciousness of others. ‘They’ are his only key to reality, he feels that he cannot exist save by harnessing their mysterious power and extorting their unaccountable consent. ‘They’ are his only means of perception and, like a blind man who depends on the sight of a dog, he feels he must leash them in order to live. To control the consciousness of others becomes his only passion; power-lust is a weed that grows only in the vacant lots of an abandoned mind.
“Every dictator is a mystic, and every mystic is a potential dictator. A mystic craves obedience from men, not their agreement. He wants them to surrender their consciousness to his assertions, his edicts, his wishes, his whims-as his consciousness is surrendered to theirs. He wants to deal with men by means of faith and force-he finds no satisfaction in their consent if he must earn it by means of facts and reason. Reason is the enemy he dreads and, simultaneously, considers precarious: reason, to him, is a means of deception, he feels that men possess some power more potent than reason-and only their causeless belief or their forced obedience can give him a sense of security, a proof that he has gained control of the mystic endowment he lacked. His lust is to command, not to convince: conviction requires an act of independence and press on the absolute of an objective reality. What he seeks is power over reality and over men’s means of perceiving it, their mind, the power to interpose his will between existence and consciousness, as if, by agreeing to fake the reality he orders them to fake, men would, in fact, create it.
“Just as the mystic is a parasite in matter, who expropriates the wealth created by others-just as he is a parasite in spirit, who plunders the ideas created by others-so he falls below the level of a lunatic who creates his own distortion of reality, to the level of a parasite of lunacy who seeks a distortion created by others.
“There is only one state that fulfills the mystic’s longing for infinity, non-causality, non-identity: death. No matter what unintelligible causes he ascribes to his incommunicable feelings, whoever rejects reality rejects existence-and the feelings that move him from then on are hatred for all the values of man’s life, and lust for all the evils that destroy it. A mystic relishes the spectacle of suffering, of poverty, subservience and terror; these give him a feeling of triumph, a proof of the defeat of rational reality. But no other reality exists.
“No matter whose welfare he professes to serve, be it the welfare of God or of that disembodied gargoyle he describes as ‘The People,’ no matter what ideal he proclaims in terms of some supernatural dimension-in fact, in reality, on earth, his ideal is death, his craving is to kill, his only satisfaction is to torture.
“Destruction is the only end that the mystics’ creed has ever achieved, as it is the only end that, you see them achieving today, and if the ravages wrought by their acts have not made them question their doctrines, if they profess to be moved by love, yet are not deterred by piles of human corpses, it is because the truth about their souls is worse than the obscene excuse you have allowed them, the excuse that the end justifies the means and that the horrors they practice are means to nobler ends. The truth is that those horrors are their ends.
“You who’re depraved enough to believe that you could adjust yourself to a mystic’s dictatorship and could please him by obeying his orders-there is no way to please him; when you obey, he will reverse his orders; he seeks obedience for the sake of obedience and destruction for the sake of destruction. You who are craven enough to believe that you can make terms with a mystic by giving in to his extortions-there is no way to buy him off, the bribe he wants is your life, as slowly or as fast as you are willing to give it in-and the monster he seeks to bribe is the hidden blank-out in his mind, which drives him to kill in order not to learn that the death he desires is his own.
“You who are innocent enough to believe that the forces let loose in your world today are moved by greed for material plunder-the mystics’ scramble for spoils is only a screen to conceal from their mind the nature of their motive. Wealth is a means of human life, and they clamor for wealth in imitation of living beings, to pretend to themselves that they desire to live, but their swinish indulgence in plundered luxury is not enjoyment, it is escape. They do not want to own your fortune, they want you to lose it; they do not want to succeed, they want you to fail; they do not want to live, they want you to die; they desire nothing, they hate existence, and they keep running, each trying not to learn that the object of his hatred is himself.
“You who’ve never grasped the nature of evil, you who describe them as ‘misguided idealists’-may the God you invented forgive you!-they are the essence of evil, they, those anti-living objects who seek, by devouring the world, to fill the selfless zero of their soul. It is not your wealth that they’re after. Theirs is a conspiracy against the mind, which means: against life and man.
“It is a conspiracy without leader or direction, and the random little thugs of the moment who cash in on the agony of one land or another are chance scum riding the torrent from the broken dam of the sewer of centuries, from the reservoir of hatred for reason, for logic, for ability, for achievement, for joy, stored by every whining anti-human who ever preached the superiority of the ‘heart’ over the mind.
“It is a conspiracy of all those who seek, not to live, but to get away with living, those who seek to cut just one small corner of reality and are drawn, by feeling, to all the others who are busy cutting other corners-a conspiracy that unites by links of evasion all those who pursue a zero as a value: the professor who, unable to think, takes pleasure in crippling the mind of his students, the businessman who, to protect his stagnation, takes pleasure in chaining the ability of competitors, the neurotic who, to defend his self-loathing, takes pleasure in breaking men of self-esteem, the incompetent who takes pleasure in defeating achievement, the mediocrity who takes pleasure in demolishing greatness, the eunuch who takes pleasure in the castration of all pleasure-and all their intellectual munition-makers, all those who preach that the immolation of virtue will transform vices into virtue. Death is the premise at the root of their theories, death is the goal of their actions in practice-and you are the last of their victims.
“We, who are the living buffers between you and the nature of your creed, are no longer there to save you from the effects of your chosen beliefs. We are no longer willing to pay with our lives the debts you incurred in yours or the moral deficit piled up by all the generations behind you. You had been living on borrowed time-and I am the man who has called in the loan.
“I am the man whose existence your blank-outs were intended to permit you to ignore. I am the man whom you did not want either to live or to die. You did not want me to live, because you were afraid of knowing that I carried the responsibility you dropped and that your lives depended upon me; you did not want me to die, because you knew it.
“Twelve years ago, when I worked in your world, I was an inventor. I was one of a profession that came last in human history and will be first to vanish on the way back to the sub-human. An inventor is a man who asks ‘Why?’ of the universe and lets nothing stand between the answer and his mind.
“Like the man who discovered the use of steam or the man who discovered the use oil, I discovered a source of energy which was available since the birth of the globe, but which men had not known how to use except as an object of worship, of terror and of legends without a thundering god. I completed the experimental model of a motor that would have made a fortune for me and for those who had hired me, a motor that would have raised the efficiency of every human installation using power and would have added the gift of higher productivity to every hour you spend at earning your living.
“Then, one night at a factory meeting, I heard myself sentenced to death by reason of my achievement. I heard three parasites assert that my brain and my life were their property, that my right to exist was conditional and depended on the satisfaction of their desires. The purpose of my ability, they said, was to serve the needs of those who were less able. I had no right to live, they said, by reason of my competence for living: their right to live was unconditional, by reason of their incompetence.
“Then I saw what was wrong with the world, I saw what destroyed men and nations, and where the battle for life had to be fought. I saw that the enemy was an inverted morality-and that my sanction was its only power. I saw that evil was impotent-that evil was the irrational, the blind, the anti-real-and that the only weapon of its triumph was the willingness of the good to serve it. Just as the parasites around me were proclaiming their helpless dependence on my mind and were expecting me voluntarily to accept a slavery they had no power to enforce, just as they were counting on my self-immolation to provide them with the means of their plan-so throughout the world and throughout men’s history, in every version and form, from the extortions of loafing relatives to the atrocities of collective countries, it is the good, the able, the men of reason, who act as their own destroyers, who transfuse to evil the blood of their virtue and let evil transmit to them the poison of destruction, thus gaining for evil the power of survival, and for their own values-the impotence of death. I saw that there comes a point, in the defeat of any man of virtue, when his own consent is needed for evil to win-and that no manner of injury done to him by others can succeed if he chooses to withhold his consent. I saw that I could put an end to your outrages by pronouncing a single word in my mind. I pronounced it. The word was ‘No.’
“I quit that factory. I quit your world, I made it my job to warn your victims and to give them the method and the weapon to fight you. The method was to refuse to deflect retribution. The weapon was justice.
“If you want to know what you lost when I quit and when my strikers deserted your world-stand on an empty stretch of soil in a wilderness unexplored by men and ask yourself what manner of survival you would achieve and how long you would last if you refused to think, with no one around to teach you the motions, or, if you chose to think, how much your mind would be able to discover-ask yourself how many independent conclusions you have reached in the course of your life and how much of your time was spent on performing the actions you learned from others-ask yourself whether you would be able to discover how to till the soil and grow your food, whether you would be able to invent a wheel, a lever, an induction coil, a generator, an electronic tube-then decide whether men of ability are exploiters who live by the fruit of your labor and rob you of the wealth that you produce, and whether you dare to believe that you possess the power to enslave them. Let your women take a look at a jungle female with her shriveled face and pendulous breasts, as she sits grinding meal in a bowl, hour after hour, century by century-then let them ask themselves whether their ‘instinct of tool-making’ will provide them with their electric refrigerators, their washing machines and vacuum cleaners, and, if not, whether they care to destroy those who provided it all, but not ‘by instinct.’
“Take a look around you, you savages who stutter that ideas are created by men’s means of production, that a machine is not the product of human thought, but a mystical power that produces human thinking. You have never discovered the industrial age-and you cling to the morality of the barbarian eras when a miserable form of human subsistence was produced by the muscular labor of slaves. Every mystic had always longed for slaves, to protect him from the material reality he dreaded. But you, you grotesque little atavists, stare blindly at the skyscrapers and smokestacks around you and dream of enslaving the material providers who are scientists, inventors, industrialists. When you clamor for public ownership of the means of production, you are clamoring for public ownership of the mind. I have taught my strikers that the answer you deserve is only: ‘Try and get it.’
“You proclaim yourself unable to harness the forces of inanimate matter, yet propose to harness the minds of men who are able to achieve the feats you cannot equal. You proclaim that you cannot survive without us, yet propose to dictate the terms of our survival. You proclaim that you need us, yet indulge the impertinence of asserting your right to rule us by force-and expect that we, who are not afraid of that physical nature which fills you with terror, will cower at the sight of any lout who has talked you into voting him a chance to command us.
“You propose to establish a social order based on the following tenets: that you’re incompetent to run your own life, but competent to run the lives of others-that you’re unfit to exist in freedom, but fit to become an omnipotent ruler-that you’re unable to earn your living by the use of your own intelligence, but able to judge politicians and to vote them into jobs of total power over arts you have never seen, over sciences you have never studied, over achievements of which you have no knowledge, over the gigantic industries where you, by your own definition of your capacity, would be unable successfully to fill the job of assistant greaser.
“This idol of your cult of zero-worship, this symbol of impotence-the congenital dependent-is your image of man and your standard of value, in whose likeness you strive to refashion your soul. ‘It’s only human,’ you cry in defense of any depravity, reaching the stage of self-abasement where you seek to make the concept ‘human’ mean the weakling, the fool, the rotter, the liar, the failure, the coward, the fraud, and to exile from the human race the hero, the thinker, the producer, the inventor, the strong, the purposeful, the pure-as if ‘to feel’ were human, but to think were not, as if to fail were human, but to succeed were not, as if corruption were human, but virtue were not-as if the premise of death were proper to man, but the premise of life were not.
“In order to deprive us of honor, that you may then deprive us of our wealth, you have always regarded us as slaves who deserve no moral recognition. You praise any venture that claims to be non-profit, and damn the men who made the profits that make the venture possible. You regard as ‘in the public interest’ any project serving those who do not pay; it is not in the public interest to provide any services for those who do the paying. ‘Public benefit’ is anything given as alms; to engage in trade is to injure the public. ‘Public welfare’ is the welfare of those who do not earn it; those who do, are entitled to no welfare. ‘The public,’ to you, is whoever has failed to achieve any virtue or value; whoever achieves it, whoever provides the goods you require for survival, ceases to be regarded as part of the public or as part of the human race.
“What blank-out permitted you to hope that you could get away with this muck of contradictions and to plan it as an ideal society, when the ‘No’ of your victims was sufficient to demolish the whole of your structure? What permits any insolent beggar to wave his sores in the face of his betters and to plead for help in the tone of a threat? You cry, as he does, that you are counting on our pity, but your secret hope is the moral code that has taught you to count on our guilt. You expect us to feel guilty of our virtues in the presence of your vices, wounds and failures-guilty of succeeding at existence, guilty of enjoying the life that you damn, yet beg us to help you to live.
“Did you want to know who is John Galt? I am the first man of ability who refused to regard it as guilt. I am the first man who would not do penance for my virtues or let them be used as the tools of my destruction. I am the first man who would not suffer martyrdom at the hands of those who wished me to perish for the privilege of keeping them alive. I am the first man who told them that I did not need them, and until they learned to deal with me as traders, giving value for value, they would have to exist without me, as I would exist without them; then I would let them learn whose is the need and whose the ability-and if human survival is the standard, whose terms would set the way to survive.
“I have done by plan and intention what has been done throughout history by silent default. There have always been men of intelligence who went on strike, in protest and despair, but they did not know the meaning of their action. The man who retires from public life, to think, but not to share his thoughts-the man who chooses to spend his years in the obscurity of menial employment, keeping to himself the fire of his mind, never giving it form, expression or reality, refusing to bring it into a world he despises-the man who is defeated by revulsion, the man who renounces before he has started, the man who gives up rather than give in, the man who functions at a fraction of his capacity, disarmed by his longing for an ideal he has not found-they are on strike, on strike against unreason, on strike against your world and your values. But not knowing any values of their own, they abandon the quest to know-in the darkness of their hopeless indignation, which is righteous without knowledge of the fight, and passionate without knowledge of desire, they concede to you the power of reality and surrender the incentives of their mind-and they perish in bitter futility, as rebels who never learned the object of their rebellion, as lovers who never discovered their love.
“The infamous times you call the Dark Ages were an era of intelligence on strike, when men of ability went underground and lived undiscovered, studying in secret, and died; destroying the works of their mind, when only a few of the bravest of martyrs remained to keep the human race alive. Every period ruled by mystics was an era of stagnation and want, when most men were on strike against existence, working for less than their barest survival, leaving nothing but scraps for their rulers to loot, refusing to think, to venture, to produce, when the ultimate collector of their profits and the final authority on truth or error was the whim of some gilded degenerate sanctioned as superior to reason by divine right and by grace of a club. The road of human history was a string of blank-outs over sterile stretches eroded by faith and force, with only a few brief bursts of sunlight, when the released energy of the men of the mind performed the wonders you gaped at, admired and promptly extinguished again.
“But there will be no extinction, this time. The game of the mystics is up. You will perish in and by your own unreality. We, the men of reason, will survive.
“I have called out on strike the kind of martyrs who had never deserted you before. I have given them the weapon they had lacked: the knowledge of their own moral value. I have taught them that the world is ours, whenever we choose to claim it, by virtue and grace of the fact that ours is the Morality of Life. They, the great victims who had produced all the wonders of humanity’s brief summer, they, the industrialists, the conquerors of matter, had not discovered the nature of their right. They had known that theirs was the power. I taught them that theirs was the glory.
“You, who dare to regard us as the moral inferiors of any mystic who claims supernatural visions-you, who scramble like vultures for plundered pennies, yet honor a fortune-teller above a fortune-maker-you, who scorn a businessman as ignoble, but esteem any posturing artist as exalted-the root of your standards is that mystic miasma which comes from primordial swamps, that cult of death, which pronounces a businessman immoral by reason of the fact that he keeps you alive. You, who claim that you long to rise above the crude concerns of the body, above the drudgery of serving mere physical needs-who is enslaved by physical needs: the Hindu who labors from sunrise to sunset at the shafts of a hand-plow for a bowl of rice, or the American who is driving a tractor? Who is the conqueror of physical reality: the man who sleeps on a bed of nails or the man who sleeps on an inner-spring mattress? Which is the monument to the triumph of the human spirit over matter: the germ-eaten hovels on the shorelines of the Ganges or the Atlantic skyline of New York?
“Unless you learn the answers to these questions-and learn to stand at reverent attention when you face the achievements of man’s mind-you will not stay much longer on this earth, which we love and will not permit you to damn. You will not sneak by with the rest of your lifespan. I have foreshortened the usual course of history and have let you discover the nature of the payment you had hoped to switch to the shoulders of others. It is the last of your own living power that will now be drained to provide the unearned for the worshippers and carriers of Death. Do not pretend that a malevolent reality defeated you-you were defeated by your own evasions. Do not pretend that you will perish for a noble ideal-you will perish as fodder for the haters of man.
“But to those of you who still retain a remnant of the dignity and will to love one’s life, I am offering the chance to make a choice. Choose whether you wish to perish for a morality you have never believed or practiced. Pause on the brink of self-destruction and examine your values and your life. You had known how to take an inventory of your wealth. Now take an inventory of your mind.
“Since childhood, you have been hiding the guilty secret that you feel no desire to be moral, no desire to seek self-immolation, that you dread and hate your code, but dare not say it even to yourself, that you’re devoid of those moral ‘instincts’ which others profess to feel. The less you felt, the louder you proclaimed your selfless love and servitude to others, in dread of ever letting them discover your own self, the self that you betrayed, the self that you kept in concealment, like a skeleton in the closet of your body. And they, who were at once your dupes and your deceivers, they listened and voiced their loud approval, in dread of ever letting you discover that they were harboring the same unspoken secret. Existence among you is a giant pretense, an act you all perform for one another, each feeling that he is the only guilty freak, each placing his moral authority in the unknowable known only to others, each faking the reality he feels they expect him to fake, some having the courage to break the vicious circle.
“No matter what dishonorable compromise you’ve made with your impracticable creed, no matter what miserable balance, half-cynicism, half-superstition, you now manage to maintain, you still preserve the root, the lethal tenet: the belief that the moral and the practical are opposites. Since childhood, you have been running from the terror of a choice you have never dared fully to identify: If the practical, whatever you must practice to exist, whatever works, succeeds, achieves your purpose, whatever brings you food and joy, whatever profits you, is evil-and if the good, the moral, is the impractical, whatever fails, destroys, frustrates, whatever injures you and brings you loss or pain-then your choice is to be moral or to live.
“The sole result of that murderous doctrine was to remove morality from life. You grew up to believe that moral laws bear no relation to the job of living, except as an impediment and threat, that man’s existence is an amoral jungle where anything goes and anything works. And in that fog of switching definitions which descends upon a frozen mind, you have forgotten that the evils damned by your creed were the virtues required for living, and you have come to believe that actual evils are the practical means of existence. Forgetting that the impractical ‘good’ was self-sacrifice, you believe that self-esteem is impractical; forgetting that the practical ‘evil’ was production, you believe that robbery is practical.
“Swinging like a helpless branch in the wind of an uncharted moral wilderness, you dare not fully to be evil or fully to live. When you are honest, you feel the resentment of a sucker; when you cheat, you feel terror and shame, your pain is augmented by the feeling that pain is your natural state. You pity the men you admire, you believe they are doomed to fail; you envy the men you hate, you believe they are the masters of existence. You feel disarmed when you come up against a scoundrel: you believe that evil is bound to win, since the moral is the impotent, the impractical.
“Morality, to you, is a phantom scarecrow made of duty, of boredom, of punishment, of pain, a cross-breed between the first schoolteacher of your past and the tax collector of your present, a scarecrow standing in a barren field, waving a stick to chase away your pleasures-and pleasure, to you, is a liquor-soggy brain, a mindless slut, the stupor of a moron who stakes his cash on some animal’s race, since pleasure cannot be moral.
“If you identify your actual belief, you will find a triple damnation-of yourself, of life, of virtue-in the grotesque conclusion you have reached: you believe that morality is a necessary evil.
“Do you wonder why you live without dignity, love without fire and die without resistance? Do you wonder why, wherever you look, you see nothing but unanswerable questions, why your life is tom by impossible conflicts, why you spend it straddling irrational fences to evade artificial choices, such as soul or body, mind or heart, security or freedom, private profit or public good?
“Do you cry that you find no answers? By what means did you hope to find them? You reject your tool of perception-your mind-then complain that the universe is a mystery. You discard your key, then wail that all doors are locked against you. You start out in pursuit of the irrational, then damn existence for making no sense.
“The fence you have been straddling for two hours-while hearing my words and seeking to escape them-is the coward’s formula contained in the sentence: ‘But we don’t have to go to extremes!’ The extreme you have always struggled to avoid is the recognition that reality is final, that A is A and that the truth is true. A moral code impossible to practice, a code that demands imperfection or death, has taught you to dissolve all ideas in fog, to permit no firm definitions, to regard any concept as approximate and any rule of conduct as elastic, to hedge on any principle, to compromise on any value, to take the middle of any road. By extorting your acceptance of supernatural absolutes, it has forced you to reject the absolute of nature. By making moral judgments impossible, it has made you incapable of rational judgment. A code that forbids you to cast the first stone, has forbidden you to admit the identity of stones and to know when or if you’re being stoned.
“The man who refuses to judge, who neither agrees nor disagrees, who declares that there are no absolutes and believes that he escapes responsibility, is the man responsible for all the blood that is now spilled in the world. Reality is an absolute, existence is an absolute, a speck of dust is an absolute and so is a human life. Whether you live or die is an absolute. Whether you have a piece of bread or not, is an absolute. Whether you eat your break or see it vanish into a looter’s stomach, is an absolute.
“There are two sides to every issue: one side is right and the other is wrong, but the middle is always evil. The man who is wrong still retains some respect for truth, if only by accepting the responsibility of choice. But the man in the middle is the knave who blanks out the truth in order to pretend that no choice or values exist, who is willing to sit out the course of any battle, willing to cash in on the blood of the innocent or to crawl on his belly to the guilty, who dispenses justice by condemning both the robber and the robbed to jail, who shoves conflicts by ordering the thinker and the fool to meet each other halfway. In any compromise between food and poison, it is only death that can win. In any compromise between good and evil, it is only evil that can profit. In that transfusion of blood which drains the good to feed the evil, the compromiser is the transmitting rubber tube.
“You, who are half-rational, half-coward, have been playing a con game with reality, but the victim you have conned is yourself. When men reduce their virtues to the approximate, then evil acquires the force of an absolute, when loyalty to an unyielding purpose is dropped by the virtuous, it’s picked up by scoundrels-and you get the indecent spectacle of a cringing, bargaining, traitorous good and a self-righteously uncompromising evil. As you surrendered to the mystics of muscle when they told you that ignorance consists of claiming knowledge, so now you surrender to them when they shriek that immorality consists of pronouncing moral judgment. When they yell that it is selfish to be certain that you are right, you hasten to assure them that you’re certain of nothing. When they shout that it’s immoral to stand on your convictions, you assure them that you have no convictions whatever. When the thugs of Europe’s People’s States snarl that you are guilty of intolerance, because you don’t treat your desire to live and their desire to kill you as a difference of opinion-you cringe and hasten to assure them that you are not intolerant of any horror. When some barefoot bum in some pesthole of Asia yells at you: How dare you be rich-you apologize and beg him to be patient and promise him you’ll give it all away.
“You have reached the blind alley of the treason you committed when you agreed that you had no right to exist. Once, you believed it was ‘only a compromise’: you conceded it was evil to live for yourself, but moral to live for the sake of your children. Then you conceded that it was selfish to live for your children, but moral to live for your community. Then you conceded that it was selfish to live for your community, but moral to live for your country. Now, you are letting this greatest of countries be devoured by any scum from any corner of the earth, while you concede that it is selfish to live for your country and that your moral duty is to live for the globe. A man who has no right to life, has no right to values and will not keep them.
“At the end of your road of successive betrayals, stripped of weapons, of certainty, of honor, you commit your final act of treason and sign your petition of intellectual bankruptcy: while the muscle-mystics of the People’s States proclaim that they’re the champions of reason and science, you agree and hasten to proclaim that faith is your cardinal principle, that reason is on the side of your destroyers, but yours is the side of faith. To the struggling remnants of rational honesty in the twisted, bewildered minds of your children, you declare that you can offer no rational argument to support the ideas that created this country, that there is no rational justification for freedom, for property, for justice, for rights, that they rest on a mystical insight and can be accepted only on faith, that in reason and logic the enemy is right, but faith is superior to reason. You declare to your children that it is rational to loot, to torture, to enslave, to expropriate, to murder, but that they must resist the temptations of logic and stick to the discipline of remaining irrational-that skyscrapers, factories, radios, airplanes were the products of faith and mystic intuition, while famines, concentration camps, and firing squads are the products of a reasonable manner of existence-that the industrial revolution was the revolt of the men of faith against that era of reason and logic which is known as the Middle Ages. Simultaneously, in the same breath, to the same child, you declare that the looters who rule the People’s States will surpass this country in material production, since they are the representatives of science, but that it’s evil to be concerned with physical wealth and that one must renounce material prosperity-you declare that the looters’ ideal are noble, but they do not mean them, while you do; that your purpose in fighting the looters is only to accomplish their aims, which they cannot accomplish, but you can; and that the way to fight them is to beat them to it and give one’s wealth away. Then you wonder why your children join the People’s thugs or become half-crazed delinquents, you wonder why the looters’ conquests keep creeping closer to your doors-and you blame it on human stupidity, declaring that the masses are impervious to reason.
“You blank out the open, public spectacle of the looters’ fight against the mind, and the fact that their bloodiest horrors are unleashed to punish the crime of thinking. You blank out the fact that most mystics of muscle started out as mystics of spirit, that they keep switching from one to the other, that the men you call materialists and spiritualists are only two halves of the same dissected human, forever seeking completion, but seeking it by swinging from the destruction of the flesh to the destruction of the soul and vice versa-that they keep running from your colleges to the slave pens of Europe to an open collapse into the mystic muck of India, seeking any refuge against reality, any form of escape from the mind.
“You blank it out and cling to your hypocrisy of ‘faith’ in order to blank out the knowledge that the looters have a stranglehold upon you, which consists of your moral code-that the looters are the final and consistent practitioners of the morality you’re half-obeying, half-evading-that they practice it the only way it can be practiced: by turning the earth into a sacrificial furnace-that your morality forbids you to oppose them in the only way they can be opposed: by refusing to become a sacrificial animal and proudly asserting your right to exist-that in order to fight them to the finish and with full rectitude, it is your morality that you have to reject.
“You blank’ it out, because your self-esteem is tied to ‘that mystic ‘unselfishness’ which you’ve never possessed or practiced, but spent so many years pretending to possess that the thought of denouncing it fills you with terror. No value is higher than self-esteem, but you’ve invested it in counterfeit securities-and now your morality has caught you in a trap where you are forced to protect your self-esteem by fighting for the creed of self-destruction. The grim joke is on you: that need of self-esteem, which you’re unable to explain or to define, belongs to my morality, not yours; it’s the objective token of my code, it is my proof within your own soul.
“By a feeling he has not learned to identify, but has derived from his first awareness of existence, from his discovery that he has to make choices, man knows that his desperate need of self-esteem is a matter of life or death. As a being of volitional consciousness, he knows that he must know his own value in order to maintain his own life. He knows that he has to be right; to be wrong in action means danger to his life; to be wrong in person, to be evil, means to be unfit for existence.
“Every act of man’s life has to be willed; the mere act of obtaining or eating his food implies that the person he preserves is worthy of being preserved; every pleasure he seeks to enjoy implies that the person who seeks it is worthy of finding enjoyment. He has no choice about his need of self-esteem, his only choice is the standard by which to gauge it. And he makes his fatal error when he switches this gauge protecting his life into the service of his own destruction, when he chooses a standard contradicting existence and sets his self-esteem against reality.
“Every form of causeless self-doubt, every feeling of inferiority and secret unworthiness is, in fact, man’s hidden dread of his inability to deal with existence. But the greater his terror, the more fiercely he clings to the murderous doctrines that choke him. No man can survive the moment of pronouncing himself irredeemably evil; should he do it, his next moment is insanity or suicide. To escape it-if he’s chosen an irrational Standard-he will fake, evade, blank out; he will cheat himself of reality, of existence, of happiness, of mind; and he will ultimately cheat himself of self-esteem by struggling to preserve its illusion rather than to risk discovering its lack. To fear to face an issue is to believe that the worst is true.
“It is not any crime you have committed that infects your soul with permanent guilt, it is none of your failures, errors or flaws, but theblank-out by which you attempt to evade them-it is not any sort of Original Sin or unknown prenatal deficiency, but the knowledge and fact of your basic default, of suspending your mind, of refusing to think. Fear and guilt are your chronic emotions, they are real and you do deserve them, but they don’t come from the superficial reasons you invent to disguise their cause, not from your ’selfishness,’ weakness or ignorance, but from a real and basic threat to your existence; fear, because you have abandoned your weapon of survival, guilt, because you know you have done it volitionally.
“The self you have betrayed is your mind; self-esteem is reliance on one’s power to think. The ego you seek, that essential ‘you’ which you cannot express or define, is not your emotions or inarticulate dreams, but your intellect, that judge of your supreme tribunal whom you’ve impeached in order to drift at the mercy of any stray shyster you describe as your ‘feeling.’ Then you drag yourself through a self-made night, in a desperate quest for a nameless fire, moved by some fading vision of a dawn you had seen and lost.
“Observe the persistence, in mankind’s mythologies, of the legend about a paradise that men had once possessed, the city of Atlantis or the Garden of Eden or some kingdom of perfection, always behind us. The root of that legend exists, not in the past of the race, but in the past of every man. You still retain a sense-not as firm as a memory, but diffused like the pain of hopeless longing-that somewhere in the starting years of your childhood, before you had learned to submit, to absorb the terror of unreason and to doubt the value of your mind, you had known a radiant state of existence, you had known the independence of a rational consciousness facing an open universe. That is the paradise which you have lost, which you seek-which is yours for the taking.
“Some of you will never know who is John Galt. But those of you who have known a single moment of love for existence and of pride in being its worthy lover, a moment of looking at this earth and letting your glance be its sanction, have known the state of being a man, and I-I am only the man who knew that that state is not to be betrayed. I am the man who knew what made it possible and who chose consistently to practice and to be what you had practiced and been in that one moment.
“That choice is yours to make. That choice-the dedication to one’s highest potential-is made by accepting the fact that the noblest act you have ever performed is the act of your mind in the process of grasping that two and two make four.
“Whoever you are-you who are alone with my words in this moment, with nothing but your honesty to help you understand-the choice is still open to be a human being, but the price is to start from scratch, to stand naked in the face of reality and, reversing a costly historical error, to declare: ‘I am, therefore I’ll think.’
“Accept the irrevocable fact that your life depends upon your mind. Admit that the whole of your struggle, your doubts, your fakes, your evasions, was a desperate quest for escape from the responsibility of a volitional consciousness-a quest for automatic knowledge, for instinctive action, for intuitive certainty-and while you called it a longing for the state of an angel, what you were seeking was the state of an animal. Accept, as your moral ideal, the task of becoming a man.
“Do not say that you’re afraid to trust your mind because you know so little. Are you safer in surrendering to mystics and discarding the little that you know? Live and act within the limit of your knowledge and keep expanding it to the limit of your life. Redeem your mind from the hockshops of authority. Accept the fact that you are not omniscient, but playing a zombie will not give you omniscience-that your mind is fallible, but becoming mindless will not make you infallible-that an error made on your own is safer than ten truths accepted on faith, because the first leaves you the means to correct it, but the second destroys your capacity to distinguish truth from error. In place of your dream of an omniscient automation, accept the fact that any knowledge man acquires is acquired by his own will and effort, and that that is his distinction in the universe, that is his nature, his morality, his glory.
“Discard that unlimited license to evil which consists of claiming that man is imperfect. By what standard do you damn him when you claim it? Accept the fact that in the realm of morality nothing less than perfection will do. But perfection is not to be gauged by mystic commandments to practice the impossible, and your moral stature is not to be gauged by matters not open to your choice. Man has a single basic choice: to think or not, and that is the gauge of his virtue. Moral perfection is an unbreached rationality-not the degree of your intelligence, but the full and relentless use of your mind, not the extent of your knowledge, but the acceptance of reason as an absolute.
“Learn to distinguish the difference between errors of knowledge and breaches of morality. An error of knowledge is not a moral flaw, provided you are willing to correct it; only a mystic would judge human beings by the standard of an impossible, automatic omniscience. But a breach of morality is the conscious choice of an action you know to be evil, or a willful evasion of knowledge, a suspension of sight and of thought. That which you do not know, is not a moral charge against you; but that which you refuse to know, is an account of infamy growing in your soul. Make every allowance for errors of knowledge; do not forgive or accept any breach of morality. Give the benefit of the doubt to those who seek to know; but treat as potential killers those specimens of insolent depravity who make demands upon you, announcing that they have and seek no reasons, proclaiming, as a license, that they ‘just feel it’-or those who reject an irrefutable argument by saying: ‘It’s only logic,’ which means: ‘It’s only reality.’ The only realm opposed to reality is the realm and premise of death.
“Accept the fact that the achievement of your happiness is the only moral purpose of your life, and that happiness-not pain or mindless self-indulgence-is the proof of your moral integrity, since it is the proof and the result of your loyalty to the achievement of your values. Happiness was the responsibility you dreaded, it required the kind of rational discipline you did not value yourself enough to assume-and the anxious staleness of your day is the monument to your evasion of the knowledge that there is no moral substitute for happiness, that there is no more despicable coward than the man who deserted the battle for his joy, fearing to assert his right to existence, lacking the courage and the loyalty to life of a bird or a flower reaching for the sun. Discard the protective rags of that vice which you called a virtue: humility-learn to value yourself, which means: to fight for your happiness-and when you learn that pride is the sum of all virtues, you will learn to live like a man.
“As a basic step of self-esteem, learn to treat as the mark of a cannibal any man’s demand for your help. To demand it is to claim that your life is his property-and loathsome as such claim might be, there’s something still more loathsome: your agreement. Do you ask if it’s ever proper to help another man? No-if he claims it as his right or as a moral duty that you owe him. Yes-if such is your own desire based on your own selfish pleasure in the value of his person and his struggle. Suffering as such is not a value; only man’s fight against suffering, is. If you choose to help a man who suffers, do it only on the ground of his virtues, of his right to recover, of his rational record, or of the fact that he suffers unjustly; then your action is still a trade, and his virtue is the payment for your help. Be to help a man who has no virtues, to help him on the ground of his suffering as such, to accept his faults, his need, as a claim-is to accept the mortgage of a zero on your values. A man who has no virtues is a hater of existence who acts on the premise of death; to help him is to sanction his evil and to support his career of destruction. Be it only a penny you will not miss or a kindly smile he has not earned, a tribute to a zero is treason to life and to all those who struggle to maintain it. It is of such pennies and smiles that the desolation of your world was made.
“Do not say that my morality is too hard for you to practice and that you fear it as you fear the unknown. Whatever living moments you have known, were lived by the values of my code. But you stifled, negated, betrayed it. You kept sacrificing your virtues to your vices, and the best among men to the worst. Look around you: what you have done to society, you have done it first within your soul; one is the image of the other. This dismal wreckage, which is now your world, is the physical form of the treason you committed to your values, to your friends, to your defenders, to your future, to your country, to yourself.
“We-whom you are now calling, but who will not answer any longer-we have lived among you, but you failed to know us, you refused to think and to see what we were. You failed to recognize the motor I invented-and it became, in your world, a pile of dead scrap. You failed to recognize the hero in your soul-and you failed to know me when I passed you in the street. When you cried in despair for the unattainable spirit which you felt had deserted your world, you gave it my name, but what you were calling was your own betrayed self-esteem. You will not recover one without the other.
“When you failed to give recognition to man’s mind and attempted to rule human beings by force-those who submitted had no mind to surrender; those who had, were men who don’t submit. Thus the man of productive genius assumed in your world the disguise of a playboy and became a destroyer of wealth, choosing to annihilate his fortune rather than surrender it to guns. Thus the thinker, the man of reason, assumed in your world the role of a pirate, to defend his values by force against your force, rather than submit to the rule of brutality. Do you hear me, Francisco d’Anconia and Ragnar Danneskjöld, my first friends, my fellow fighters, my fellow outcasts, in whose name and honor I speak?
“It was the three of us who started what I am now completing. It was the three of us who resolved to avenge this country and to release its imprisoned soul. This greatest of countries was built on my morality-on the inviolate supremacy of man’s right to exist-but you dreaded to admit it and live up to it. You stared at an achievement unequaled in history, and looted its effects and blanked out its cause. In the presence of that monument to human morality, which is a factory, a highway or a bridge-you kept damning this country as immoral and its progress as ‘material greed,’ you kept offering apologies for this country’s greatness to the idol of primordial starvation, to decaying Europe’s idol of a leprous, mystic bum.
“This country-the product of reason-could not survive on the morality of sacrifice. It was not built by men who sought self-immolation or by men who sought handouts. It could not stand on the mystic split that divorced man’s soul from his body. It could not live by the mystic doctrine that damned this earth as evil and those who succeeded on earth as depraved. From its start, this country was a threat to the ancient rule of mystics. In the brilliant rocket-explosion of its youth, this country displayed to an incredulous world what greatness was possible to man, what happiness was possible on earth. It was one or the other: America or mystics. The mystics knew it; you didn’t. You let them infect you with the worship of need-and this country became a giant in body with a mooching midget in place of its soul, while its living soul was driven underground to labor and feed you in silence, unnamed, unhonored, negated, its soul and hero: the industrialist. Do you hear me now, Hank Rearden, the greatest of the victims I have avenged?
“Neither he nor the rest of us will return until the road is clear to rebuild this country-until the wreckage of the morality of sacrifice has been wiped out of our way. A country’s political system is based on its code of morality. We will rebuild America’s system on the moral premise which had been its foundation, but which you treated as a guilty underground, in your frantic evasion of the conflict between that premise and your mystic morality: the premise that man is an end in himself, not the means to the ends of others, that man’s life, his freedom, his happiness are his by inalienable right.
“You who’ve lost the concept of a right, you who swing in impotent evasiveness between the claim that rights are a gift of God, a supernatural gift to be taken on faith, or the claim that rights are a gift of society, to be broken at its arbitrary whim-the source of man’s rights is not divine law or congressional law, but the law of identity. A is A-and Man is Man. Rights are conditions of existence required by man’s nature for his proper survival. If man is to live on earth, it is right for him to use his mind, his right to act on his own free judgment, it is right to work for his values and to keep the product of his work. If life on earth is his purpose, he has a right to live as a rational being: nature forbids him the irrational. Any group, any gang, any nation that attempts to negate man’s rights, is wrong, which means: is evil, which means: is anti-life.
“Rights are a moral concept-and morality is a matter of choice. Men are free not to choose man’s survival as the standard of their morals and their laws, but not free to escape from the fact that the alternative is a cannibal society, which exists for a while by devouring its best and collapses like a cancerous body, when the healthy have been eaten by the diseased, when the rational have been consumed by the irrational. Such has been the fate of your societies in history, but you’ve evaded the knowledge of the cause. I am here to state it: the agent of retribution was the law of identity, which you cannot escape. Just as man cannot live by means of the irrational, so two men cannot, or two thousand, or two billion. Just as man can’t succeed by defying reality, so a nation can’t, or a country, or a globe. A is A. The rest is a matter of time, provided by the generosity of victims.
“Just as man can’t exist without his body, so no rights can exist without the right to translate one’s rights into reality-to think, to work and to keep the results-which means: the right of poverty. The modern mystics of muscle who offer you the fraudulent alternative of ‘human rights’ versus ‘property rights,’ as if one could exist without the other, are making a last, grotesque attempt to revive the doctrine of soul versus body. Only a ghost can exist without material property; only a slave can work with no right to the product of his effort. The doctrine that ‘human rights’ are superior to ‘property rights’ simply means that some human beings have the right to make property out of others; since the competent have nothing to gain from the incompetent, it means the right of the incompetent to own their betters and to use them as productive cattle. Whoever regards this as human and right, has no right to the title of ‘human.’
“The source of property rights is the law of causality. All property and all forms of wealth are produced by man’s mind and labor. As you cannot have effects without causes, so you cannot have wealth without its source: without intelligence. You cannot force intelligence to work: those who’re able to think, will not work under compulsion: those who will, won’t produce much more than the price of the whip needed to keep them enslaved. You cannot obtain the products of a mind except on the owner’s terms, by trade and by volitional consent. Any other policy of men toward man’s poverty is the policy of criminals, no matter what their numbers. Criminals are savages who play in short-range and starve when their prey runs out-just as you’re starving today, you who believed that crime could be ‘practical’ if your government decreed that robbery was legal and resistance to robbery illegal.
“The only proper purpose of a government is to protect man’s rights, which means: to protect him from physical violence. A proper government is only a policeman, acting as an agent of man’s self-defense, and, as such, may resort to force only against those who start the use of force. The only proper functions of a government are: the police, to protect you from criminals; the army, to protect you from foreign invaders; and the courts, to protect your property and contracts from breach or fraud by others, to settle disputes by rational rules, according to objective law. But a government that initiates the employment of force against men who had forced no one, the employment of armed compulsion against disarmed victims, is a nightmare infernal machine designed to annihilate morality: such a government reverses its only moral purpose and switches from the role of protector to the role of man’s deadliest enemy, from the role of policeman to the role of a criminal vested with the right to the wielding of violence against victims deprived of the right of self-defense. Such a government substitutes for morality the following rule of social conduct: you may do whatever you please to your neighbor, provided your gang is bigger than his.
“Only a brute, a fool or an evader can agree to exist on such terms or agree to give his fellow men a blank check on his life and his mind, to accept the belief that others have the right to dispose of his person at their whim, that the will of the majority is Omnipotent, that the physical force of muscles and numbers is a substitute for justice, reality and truth. We, the men of the mind, we who are traders, not masters or slaves, do not deal in blank checks or grant them. We do not live or work with any form of the non-objective.
“So long as men, in the era of savagery, had no concept of objective reality and believed that physical nature was ruled by the whim of unknowable demons-no thought, no science, no production were possible. Only when men discovered that nature was a firm, predictable absolute were they able to rely on their knowledge, to choose their course, to plan their future and, slowly, to rise from the cave. Now you have placed modern industry, with its immense complexity of scientific precision, back into the power of unknowable demons-the unpredictable power of the arbitrary whims of hidden, ugly little bureaucrats. A farmer will not invest the effort of one summer if he’s unable to calculate his chances of a harvest. But you expect industrial giants-who plan in terms of decades, invest in terms of generations and undertake ninety-nine-year contracts-to continue to function and produce, not knowing what random caprice in the skull of what random official will descend upon them at what moment to demolish the whole of their effort. Drifters and physical laborers live and plan by the range of a day. The better the mind, the longer the range. A man whose vision extends to a shanty, might continue to build on your quicksands, to grab a fast profit and run. A man who envisions skyscrapers, will not. Nor will he give ten years of unswerving devotion to the task of inventing a new product, when he knows the gangs of entrenched mediocrity are juggling the laws against him, to tie him, restrict him and force him to fail, but should he fight them and struggle and succeed, they will seize his rewards and his invention.
“Look past the range of the moment, you who cry that you fear to compete with men of superior intelligence, that their mind is a threat to your livelihood, that the strong leave no chance to the weak in a market of voluntary trade. What determines the material value of your work? Nothing but the productive effort of your mind-if you lived on a desert island. The less efficient the thinking of your brain, the less your physical labor would bring you-and you could spend your life on a single routine, collecting a precarious harvest or hunting with bow and arrows, unable to think any further. But when you live in a rational society, where men are free to trade, you receive an incalculable bonus: the material value of your work is determined not only by your effort, but by the effort of the best productive minds who exist in the world around you.
“When you work in a modern factory, you are paid, not only for your labor, but for all the productive genius which has made that factory possible: for the work of the industrialist who built it, for the work of the investor who saved the money to risk on the untried and the new, for the work of the engineer who designed the machines of which you are pushing the levers, for the work of the inventor who created the product which you spend your time on making, for the work of the scientist who discovered the laws that went into the making of that product, for the work of the philosopher who taught men how to think and whom your spend your time denouncing.
“The machine, the frozen form of a living intelligence, is the power that expands the potential of your life by raising the productivity of your time. If you worked as a blacksmith in the mystics’ Middle Ages, the whole of your earning capacity would consist of an iron bar produced by your hands in days and days of effort. How many tons of rail do you produce per day if you work for Hank Rearden? Would you dare to claim that the size of your pay cheek was created solely by your physical labor and that those rails were the product of your muscles? The standard of living of that blacksmith is all that your muscles are worth; the rest is a gift from Hank Rearden.
“Every man is free to rise as far as he’s able or willing, but it’s only the degree to which he thinks that determines the degree to which he’ll rise. Physical labor as such can extend no further than the range of the moment. The man who does no more than physical labor, consumes the material value-equivalent of his own contribution to the process of production, and leaves no further value, neither for himself nor others. But the man who produces an idea in any field of rational endeavor-the man who discovers new knowledge-is the permanent benefactor of humanity. Material products can’t be shared, they belong to some ultimate consumer; it Is only the value of an idea that can be shared with unlimited numbers of men, making all sharers richer at no one’s sacrifice or loss, raising the productive capacity of whatever labor they perform. It is the value of his own time that the strong of the intellect transfers to the weak, letting them work on the jobs he discovered, while devoting his time to further discoveries. This is mutual trade to mutual advantage; the interests of the mind are one, no matter what the degree of intelligence, among men who desire to work and don’t seek or expect the unearned.
“In proportion to the mental energy he spent, the man who creates a new invention receives but a small percentage of his value in terms of material payment, no matter what fortune he makes, no matter what millions he earns. But the man who works as a janitor in the factory producing that invention, receives an enormous payment in proportion to the mental effort that his job requires of him. And the same is true of all men between, on all levels of ambition and ability. The man at the top of the intellectual pyramid contributes the most to all those below him, but gets nothing except his material payment, receiving no intellectual bonus from others to add to the value of his time. The man at the bottom who, left to himself, would starve in his hopeless ineptitude, contributes nothing to those above him, but receives the bonus of all of their brains. Such is the nature of the ‘competition’ between the strong and the weak of the intellect. Such is the pattern of ‘exploitation’ for which you have damned the strong.
“Such was the service we had given you and were glad and willing to give. What did we ask in return? Nothing but freedom. We required that you leave us free to function-free to think and to work as we choose-free to take our own risks and to bear our own losses-free to earn our own profits and to make our own fortunes-free to gamble on your rationality, to submit our products to your judgment for the purpose of a voluntary trade, to rely on the objective value of our work and on your mind’s ability to see it-free to count on your intelligence and honesty, and to deal with nothing but your mind. Such was the price we asked, which you chose to reject as too high. You decided to call it unfair that we, who had dragged you out of your hovels and provided you with modern apartments, with radios, movies and cars, should own our palaces and yachts-you decided that you had a right to your wages, but we had no right to our profits, that you did not want us to deal with your mind, but to deal, instead, with your gun. Our answer to that, was: ‘May you be damned!’ Our answer came true. You are.
“You did not care to compete in terms of intelligence-you are now competing in terms of brutality. You did not care to allow rewards to be won by successful production-you are now running a race in which rewards are won by successful plunder. You called it selfish and cruel that men should trade value for value-you have now established an unselfish society where they trade extortion for extortion. Your system is a legal civil war, where men gang up on one another and struggle for possession of the law, which they use as a club over rivals, till another gang wrests it from their clutch and clubs them with it in their turn, all of them clamoring protestations of service to an unnamed public’s unspecified good. You had said that you saw no difference between economic and political power, between the power of money and the power of guns-no difference between reward and punishment, no difference between purchase and plunder, no difference between pleasure and fear, no difference between life and death. You are learning the difference now.
“Some of you might plead the excuse of your ignorance, of a limited mind and a limited range. But the damned and the guiltiest among you are the men who had the capacity to know, yet chose to blank out reality, the men who were willing to steel their intelligence into cynical servitude to force: the contemptible breed of those mystics of science who profess a devotion to some sort of ‘pure knowledge’-the purity consisting of their claim that such knowledge has no practical purpose on this earth-who reserve their logic for inanimate matter, but believe that the subject of dealing with men requires and deserves no rationality, who scorn money and sell their souls in exchange for a laboratory supplied by loot. And since there is no such thing as ‘non-practical knowledge’ or any sort of ‘disinterested’ action, since they scorn the use of their science for the purpose and profit of life, they deliver their science to the service of death, to the only practical purpose it can ever have for looters: to inventing weapons of coercion and destruction. They, the intellects who seek escape from moral values, they are the damned on their earth, theirs is the guilt beyond forgiveness. Do you hear me, Dr. Robert Stadler?
“But it is not to him that I wish to speak. I am speaking to those among you who have retained some sovereign shred of their soul, unsold and unstamped: ‘-to the order of others.’ If, in the chaos of the motives that have made you listen to the radio tonight, there was an honest, rational desire to learn what is wrong with the world, you are the man whom I wished to address. By the rules and terms of my code, one owes a rational statement to those whom it does concern and who’re making an effort to know. Those who’re making an effort to fall to understand me, are not a concern of mine.
“I am speaking to those who desire to live and to recapture the honor of their soul. Now that you know the truth about your world stop supporting your own destroyers. The evil of the world is made possible by nothing but the sanction to give it. Withdraw your sanction. Withdraw your support. Do not try to live on your enemies’ terms or to win at a game where they’re setting the rules. Do not seek the favor of those who enslaved you, do not beg for alms from those who have robbed you, be it subsidies, loans or jobs, do not join their team to recoup what they’ve taken by helping them rob your neighbors. One cannot hope to maintain one’s life by accepting bribes to condone one’s destruction. Do not straggle for profit, success or security at the price of a lien on your right to exist. Such a lien is not to be paid off; the more you pay them, the more they will demand; the greater the values you seek or achieve, the more vulnerably helpless you become. Theirs is a system of white blackmail devised to bleed you, not by means of your sins, but by means of your love for existence.
“Do not attempt to rise on the looters’ terms or to climb a ladder while they’re holding the ropes. Do not allow their hands to touch the only power that keeps them in power: your living ambition. Go on strike-in the manner I did. Use your mind and skill in private, extend your knowledge, develop your ability, but do not share your achievements with others. Do not try to produce a fortune, with a looter riding on your back. Stay on the lowest rung of their ladder, earn no more than your barest survival, do not make an extra penny to support the looters’ state. Since you’re captive, act as a captive, do not help them pretend that you’re free. Be the silent, incorruptible enemy they dread. When they force you, obey-but do not volunteer. Never volunteer a step in their direction, or a wish, or a plea, or a purpose. Do not help a holdup man to claim that he acts as your friend and benefactor. Do not help your jailers to pretend that their jail is your natural state of existence. Do not help them to fake reality. That fake is the only dam holding off their secret terror, the terror of knowing they’re unfit to exist; remove it and let them drown; your sanction is their only life belt.
“If you find a chance to vanish into some wilderness out of their reach, do so, but not to exist as a bandit or to create a gang competing with their racket; build a productive life of your own with those who accept your moral code and are willing to struggle for a human existence. You have no chance to win on the Morality of Death or by the code of faith and force; raise a standard to which the honest will repair: the standard of Life and Reason.
“Act as a rational being and aim at becoming a rallying point for all those who are starved for a voice of integrity-act on your rational values, whether alone in the midst of your enemies, or with a few of your chosen friends, or as the founder of a modest community on the frontier of mankind’s rebirth.
“When the looters’ state collapses, deprived of the best of its slaves, when it falls to a level of impotent chaos, like the mystic-ridden nations of the Orient, and dissolves into starving robber gangs fighting to rob one another-when the advocates of the morality of sacrifice perish with their final ideal-then and on that day we will return.
“We will open the gates of our city to those who deserve to enter, a city of smokestacks, pipe lines, orchards, markets and inviolate homes. We will act as the rallying center for such hidden outposts as you’ll build. With the sign of the dollar as our symbol-the sign of free trade and free minds-we will move to reclaim this country once more from the impotent savages who never discovered its nature, its meaning, its splendor. Those who choose to join us, will join us; those who don’t, will not have the power to stop us; hordes of savages have never been an obstacle to men who carried the banner of the mind.
“Then this country will once more become a sanctuary for a vanishing species: the rational being. The political system we will build is contained in a single moral premise: no man may obtain any values from others by resorting to physical force. Every man will stand or fall, live or die by his rational judgment. If he fails to use it and falls, he will be his only victim. If he fears that his judgment is inadequate, he will not be given a gun to improve it. If he chooses to correct his errors in time, he will have the unobstructed example of his betters, for guidance in learning to think; but an end will be put to the infamy of paying with one life for the errors of another.
“In that world, you’ll be able to rise in the morning with the spirit you have known in your childhood: that spirit of eagerness, adventure and certainty which comes from dealing with a rational universe. No child is afraid of nature; it is your fear of men that will vanish, the fear that has stunted your soul, the fear you acquired in your early encounters with the incomprehensible, the unpredictable, the contradictory, the arbitrary, the hidden, the faked, the irrational in men. You will live in a world of responsible beings, who will be as consistent and reliable as facts; the guarantee of their character will be a system of existence where objective reality is the standard of the judge. Your virtues will be given protection, your vices and weaknesses will not. Every chance will be open to your good, none will be provided for your evil. What you’ll receive from men will not be alms, or pity, or mercy, or forgiveness of sins, but a single value: justice. And when you’ll look at men or at yourself, you will feel, not disgust, suspicion and guilt, but a single constant: respect.
“Such is the future you are capable of winning. It requires a struggle; so does any human value. All life is a purposeful struggle, and your only choice is the choice of a goal. Do you wish to continue the battle of your present or do you wish to fight for my world? Do you wish to continue a struggle that consists of clinging to precarious ledges in a sliding descent to the abyss, a struggle where the hardships you endure are irreversible and the victories you win bring you closer to destruction? Or do you wish to undertake a struggle that consists of rising from ledge to ledge in a steady ascent to the top, a struggle where the hardships are investments in your future, and the victories bring you irreversibly closer to the world of your moral ideal, and should you die without reaching full sunlight, you will die on a level touched by its rays? Such is the choice before you. Let your mind and your love of existence decide.
“The last of my words will be addressed to those heroes who might still be hidden in the world, those who are held prisoner, not by their evasions, but by their virtues and their desperate courage. My brothers in spirit, check on your virtues and on the nature of the enemies you’re serving. Your destroyers hold you by means of your endurance, your generosity, your innocence, your love-the endurance that carries their burdens-the generosity that responds to their cries of despair-the innocence that is unable to conceive of their evil and gives them the benefit of every doubt, refusing to condemn them without understanding and incapable of understanding such motives as theirs-the love, your love of life, which makes you believe that they are men and that they love it, too. But the world of today is the world they wanted; life is the object of their hatred. Leave them to the death they worship. In the name of your magnificent devotion to this earth, leave them, don’t exhaust the greatness of your soul on achieving the triumph of the evil of theirs. Do you hear me … my love?
“In the name of the best within you, do not sacrifice this word to those who are its worst. In the name of the values that keep you alive, do not let your vision of man be distorted by the ugly, the cowardly, the mindless in those who have never achieved his title. Do not lose your knowledge that man’s proper estate is an upright posture, an intransigent mind and a step that travels unlimited roads. Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark, in the hopeless swamps of the approximate, the not-quite, the not-yet, the not-at-all. Do not let the hero in your soul perish, in lonely frustration for the life you deserved, but have never been able to reach. Check your road and the nature of your battle. The world you desired can be won, it exists, it is real, it is possible, it’s yours.
“But to win it requires your total dedication and a total break with the world of your past, with the doctrine that man is a sacrificial animal who exists for the pleasure of others. Fight for the value of your person. Fight for the virtue of your pride. Fight for the essence of that which is man: for his sovereign rational mind. Fight with the radiant certainty and the absolute rectitude of knowing that yours is the Morality of Life and that yours is the battle for any achievement, any value, any grandeur, any goodness, any joy that has ever existed on this earth.
“You will win when you are ready to pronounce the oath I have taken at the start of my battle-and for those who wish to know the day of my return, I shall now repeat it to the hearing of the world:
“I swear-by my life and my love of it-that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine." - Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand

Obama Care: Lost Freedom for the Health of It!

2009-08-11T18:11:00.000-07:00

Fascinating article on that Conservative (???) website, CNN (otherwise known as the Clinton-Communist News Network). Not sure how this slipped through, so I'll give the link, and highlight main points before they realize their mistake (something actually questioning health care through the Obama administration). The article is "The 5 Freedoms You'd Lose in Health Care Reform," by Shawn Tully, Editor at large (though probably not for long, if CNN wants access for the 100th interview with administration staffers about why Obama is so dreamy - you know, the hard hitting questions - my comments will be in parentheses):
http://money.cnn.com/2009/07/24/news/economy/health_care_reform_obama.fortune/

"Let's explore the five freedoms that Americans would lose under Obamacare:

1. Freedom to choose what's in your plan
The bills in both houses require that Americans purchase insurance through "qualified" plans offered by health-care "exchanges" that would be set up in each state. The rub is that the plans can't really compete based on what they offer. The reason: The federal government will impose a minimum list of benefits that each plan is required to offer."

(I'd like to believe the government will have our best interests at heart, but after seeing this in action with Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, the Federal Reserve, Education, Amtrak, the Postal Service, and the current bailouts and TARP programs, I'm not holding my breath)

"2. Freedom to be rewarded for healthy living, or pay your real costs
As with the previous example, the Obama plan enshrines into federal law one of the worst features of state legislation: community rating. Eleven states, ranging from New York to Oregon, have some form of community rating. In its purest form, community rating requires that all patients pay the same rates for their level of coverage regardless of their age or medical condition."

(And who determines that rating - is it the community, or the same politicians that determined the stress tests on the banks, or rankings on education, or political operatives and cronies of the politicians themselves - I know who won't be involved in these decisions - you and I)

"3. Freedom to choose high-deductible coverage
The bills threaten to eliminate the one part of the market truly driven by consumers spending their own money. That's what makes a market, and health care needs more of it, not less."

(Fortunately, the politicians know the system better then us, so they know us better than us - simples causal relationship, through fuzzy math - just another situation where government knows what best for us)

"4. Freedom to keep your existing plan
This is the freedom that the President keeps emphasizing. Yet the bills appear to say otherwise. It's worth diving into the weeds -- the territory where most pundits and politicians don't seem to have ventured."

(Obama actually stated that we shouldn't worry about government competing with private concerns using the Postal Service as an example, when FEDEX and American Express are competitive - the Postal Service lost $7 billion in 2007 and another $7 billion in 2008 - so is he saying that we want government to lose money in this venture as well since it won't be competitive, just look at the Postal Service???)

"5. Freedom to choose your doctors
The Senate bill requires that Americans buying through the exchanges -- and as we've seen, that will soon be most Americans -- must get their care through something called "medical home." Medical home is similar to an HMO. You're assigned a primary care doctor, and the doctor controls your access to specialists. The primary care physicians will decide which services, like MRIs and other diagnostic scans, are best for you, and will decide when you really need to see a cardiologists or orthopedists."

(As I've talked to many doctors, HMOs are part of the problem not the solution. And since when is being assigned a primary care doctor (hopefully not just one who contributed to the democratic candidates) doesn't sound like we can choose who we want - and shouldn't we have the choice to decide what we want and what we don't want - what happened to any free-market system, that we all knew and loved?)

And then Shawn Tully closes with: "The best solution is to move to a let-freedom-ring regime of high deductibles, no community rating, no standard benefits, and cross-state shopping for bargains (another market-based reform that's strictly taboo in the bills). I'll propose my own solution in another piece soon on Fortune.com. For now, we suffer with a flawed health-care system, but we still have our Five Freedoms. Call them the Five Endangered Freedoms."

(I am curious as to what plan we are patterning ourselves after, while costing the American people anywhere from $1 - 23 trillion depending which bill would pass, as stated by the Congressional Budget Office - as we ration care (and don't let them tell you differently) as we've been told Massachusetts (which isn't working), or California (with the greatest budget deficits in the country), the Canadian system (which has waits of 8 months compared to weeks on major procedures), etc. - can you see how none of this can be possibly "budget-neutral" no matter what our "Commander-in-Thief" says. )

So don't worry Shawn, you make far too much sense for CNN, I'm sure I'll see you with the CATO Institute soon (perhaps not soon enough).

And isn't it amazing, through all this secrecy on the bills, that we supposedly have time to read these bills - weren't they trying to pass this in two weeks? I've read the bill, and unfortunately we can't say the same of our elected officials - and I do appreciate the name-calling from those same officials, rather than actually reading what they are attempting to ram down our throats - the next election won't come soon enough. But my question is: will it be too late?

Burn After Reading (Great Title, Bad Movie, Worse Reality)

2009-08-11T06:24:00.000-07:00

"We need to stand up together, or get on our knees separately" - D. McDougall

(This post covers what TARP isn't doing, and at the bottom, a fascinating new job posting from the US Army)

From ABC News, August 11, 2009 (highlights as well as comments in parentheses are mine):

"(T)he Congressional Oversight Panel warns in its August report, TARP (Troubled Asset Relief Program) never actually bought any troubled assets."
"It is likely that an overwhelming portion of the troubled assets from last October remain on bank balance sheets today," the panel's report says. (That part makes me nervous - likely??? So even the panel doesn't know for sure how much is out there?)
"We are now 10 months into TARP," the panel's report notes, "and troubled assets remain a substantial danger to the financial system." (So who's supposed to address this?)
"In order to advance a full recovery in the economy, there must be greater transparency, accountability, and clarity, from both the government and banks, about the scope of the troubled asset problem," the Panel proposes." (Remember that promise???)
(Wasn't that the purpose of the TARP??? I believe the free-market system will reject it's shackles and improve the economy (I believe it's happening right now) so as the TARP didn't cause this, the lack of coverage of the troubled assets, will make the future financially unbearable)
Ultimately, the panel says, "Financial stability remains at risk if the underlying problem of troubled assets remains unresolved." (This is not a ideological issue, unfortunately, this is an economic issue, that led to a political issue - the economy will take care of itself, it always does, but the politics leads to total governmental control over ALL facets of our lives - is that what you want?)
https://mail.tcaps.net/exchweb/bin/redir.asp?URL=http://abcnews.go.com/Business/Story?id=8296946%26page=1
(Please contact your Senators and Representatives - it still has to be up to you, even as Rep. Nancy Pelosi says protest is "Un-American," I rely on that wise political sage, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (stated 2003) "I am sick and tired of people who say that if you debate and you disagree with this administration somehow you're not patriotic. We should stand up and say, we are Americans and we have a right to debate and disagree with any administration." For once, I agree with her.)

By the way, the United States Army has the latest employment post, if someone is looking for a job -
https://mail.tcaps.net/exchweb/bin/redir.asp?URL=http://www.goarmy.com/JobDetail.do?id=292 Read under "Advanced Responsibilities" concerning the handling of "the operation of a displaced civilian (DC) resettlement facility." That's not an internment camp, is it??? Look at the title of the position - Internment/Resettlement Specialist (31E) - you tell me.....please?

Great quote from Doug Patton (August 11, 2009)
https://mail.tcaps.net/exchweb/bin/redir.asp?URL=http://www.gopusa.com/commentary/dpatton/2009/dp_08111.shtml
"During the dark days of Adolf Hitler's Nazi Germany, Lutheran Pastor and Theologian Martin Niemoller wrote these now-famous words: "First they came for the Communists, but I was not a Communist, so I did not speak out. Then they came for the Socialists and Trade Unionists, but I was not one of them, so I did not speak out. Then they came for the Jews, but I was not Jewish, so I did not speak out. And when they came for me, there was no one left to speak out for me."

"Fast forward three-quarters of a century: First they nationalized the banks, and though I was not a banker, I spoke out, but no one listened. Then they nationalized the automobile companies, and though I did not work for them, I spoke out. Some people listened, but others took advantage of "cash for clunkers." Then they nationalized the health care system, and though I did not work in health care, I spoke out loud and clear. And if they come to place me in an internment/resettlement camp for speaking out, will there be anyone to speak out for me? "

Definitely, something to think about - and hopefully, you'll do something about it -

"They won't have to silence us if we don't speak" - D. McDougall

Are We Patriotic?

2009-08-10T07:47:00.000-07:00

It's Amazing to listen to these Senators and Representatives who say that those who disagree with the Obama's Health Care Plan, as "thugs," involved in "mob rule," who are trying to "hijack" these town hall meetings because they want answers, and they disagree with the plans considered by elected officials who are pushing this major overhaul in unprecedented speed, while working with various organizations - while the administration is working with it's own group to push the Obama agenda through Organizing for America, available on the President's own site http://my.barackobama.com/page/community/post/obamaforamerica/gGxNxV

For the defense of intelligent people across this country, who want the facts, and don't want to be forced by the government, who truly is not representing our country, we turn to that wise old political sage, Hillary Clinton, who stated: "I am sick and tired of people who say that if you debate and you disagree with this administration somehow you're not patriotic, We should stand up and say, we are Americans and we have a right to debate and disagree with any administration." (stated at the Jefferson Jackson Bailey Dinner, 2003)

For once, I'd have to agree with her.

Well, I'll be audited for Standing up for my (and your) Rights!

2009-08-09T15:34:00.000-07:00

Sent this to flag@whitehouse.gov who's watching out for "fishy" information on health care - its seems the "fishiest" seems to be coming from the President himself, so I felt I needed to report this - luckily, if this is anything like most of the bills before Congress, no one will have read it (though that doesn't mean they won't vote for it) - and I'll probably be audited - even though I'm protected under law, that hasn't stopped this government before.

"As has been stated from the Whitehouse: "There is a lot of disinformation about health insurance reform out there, spanning from control of personal finances to end of life care. These rumors often travel just below the surface via chain emails or through casual conversation. Since we can’t keep track of all of them here at the White House, we’re asking for your help. If you get an email or see something on the web about health insurance reform that seems fishy"

http://www.barackobama.com/issues/healthcare/

As a patriotic American, I feel it is my duty to report the website above, which truly demonstrates a careless disregard for the facts, appealing to it's own political base, rather than the American people, and hopefully you will be able to avoid pesky laws such as the Privacy Act and the First Amendment, and so many other laws that supposedly protects groups like this to present their political propaganda. I'm glad to see these "truth squads" available in this country (they worked so well in Europe, particularly Germany, which is ironic, since we are attempting to pattern our Health Care system after them). I hope the offending site will be shut down soon, before they can perpetrate any more "fishy" statements about Health Care, as we head down this path of Socialism. It's exciting to see what the government has done with Medicare and Medicaid, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, Education, Amtrak, the Postal Service, and Federal Reserve, as well as the Trillions in bailouts and debt added on to our system, and to imagine that the Health Care plan could outdo them all as the pinultimate example of why government should not interfere with the Free Market system, as each of the above examples will attest.

Thank you, Dr. Dan A. McDougall"

Happy B-Day to Me and the Prez!

2009-08-06T15:08:00.000-07:00

I had chills run up and down my leg when I realized the President and myself share a birthday - August 4th - we exchanged gifts (I had to pay for them)

From the Whitehouse website -

"There is a lot of disinformation about health insurance reform out there, spanning from control of personal finances to end of life care. These rumors often travel just below the surface via chain emails or through casual conversation. Since we can’t keep track of all of them here at the White House, we’re asking for your help. If you get an email or see something on the web about health insurance reform that seems fishy, send it to flag@whitehouse.gov."

http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/Facts-Are-Stubborn-Things/ there are some great spins on this (perhaps more "truthy"?) on YouTube - you'll have to look them up, but if you type in "Obama" and "Fishy" as a keyword search, you'll be looking at a lot of videos

Feel free to send my name in (I'm already on Obama's, Pelosi's, and Reid's mailing list - have sent enough e-mails to them) - I've already sent my website to the Whitehouse (got some nice form letters back) - if you'd like it sent to you, let me know - it is your patriotic duty - fortunately, now that bad old Gitmo is closing (someday?) but we'll have all of those fine individuals up in one of our prisons in Michigan (rumor is Standish) so we got that going for us - and I'll be able to commute. And I do hope we'll set up the congressional committees and loyalty review boards soon so we can get names of the all bad people "Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Free Market System of the United States?" and next, I'm sure we'll have some Red (State) Scares as well.

I feel safer knowing that the government has it's own truth squad, and fortunately with the mandatory community service of all citizens under the age of 25 (didn't we have something like that in Europe - was it in Germany, possibly?) I'm feeling rather warm and fuzzy all over knowing that the government's goal is to supply everything to me, since we'll soon be rid of that bad old free market system - And I do look forward to meeting any of these government officials, in the same room - at least then someone in the room will have an Economics degree - and I have already offered to all of the members of Congress, the Executive Branch including the 32 CZARS and the Fed Reserve Bernanke a free course in Econ 101 - so far, no takers - now that's STIMULATING!

545 vs. 300 Million - So Why are We Losing?

2009-08-06T14:20:00.000-07:00

Sent by a good friend - definitely worth a read!

545 PEOPLE By Charlie Reese

Politicians are the only people in the world who create problems and then campaign against them. Have you ever wondered, if both the Democrats and the Republicans are against deficits, WHY do we have deficits? Have you ever wondered, if all the politicians are against inflation and high taxes, WHY do we have inflation and high taxes? You and I don't propose a federal budget. The president does. You and I don't have the Constitutional authority to vote on appropriations. The House of Representatives does. You and I don't write the tax code, Congress does. You and I don't set fiscal policy, Congress does. You and I don't control monetary policy, the Federal Reserve Bank does. One hundred senators, 435 congressmen, one president, and nine Supreme Court justices equates to 545 human beings out of the 300 million are directly, legally, morally, and individually responsible for the domestic problems that plague this country. I excluded the members of the Federal Reserve Board because that problem was created by the Congress. In 1913, Congress delegated its Constitutional duty to provide a sound currency to a federally chartered, but private, central bank. I excluded all the special interests and lobbyists for a sound reason.. They have no legal authority. They have no ability to coerce a senator, a congressman, or a president to do one cotton-picking thing. I don't care if they offer a politician $1 million dollars in cash. The politician has the power to accept or reject it. No matter what the lobbyist promises, it is the legislator's responsibility to determine how he votes. Those 545 human beings spend much of their energy convincing you that what they did is not their fault. They cooperate in this common con regardless of party. What separates a politician from a normal human being is an excessive amount of gall. No normal human being would have the gall of a Speaker, who stood up and criticized the President for creating deficits.. The president can only propose a budget. He cannot force the Congress to accept it. The Constitution, which is the supreme law of the land, gives sole responsibility to the House of Representatives for originating and approving appropriations and taxes. Who is the speaker of the House? Nancy Pelosi. She is the leader of the majority party. She and fellow House members, not the president, can approve any budget they want. If the president vetoes it, they can pass it over his veto if they agree to. It seems inconceivable to me that a nation of 300 million can not replace 545 people who stand convicted -- by present facts -- of incompetence and irresponsibility. I can't think of a single domestic problem that is not traceable directly to those 545 people. When you fully grasp the plain truth that 545 people exercise the power of the federal government, then it must follow that what exists is what they want to exist. If the tax code is unfair, it's because they want it unfair. If the budget is in the red, it's because they want it in the red .. If the Army &Marines are in IRAQ , it's because they want them in IRAQ If they do not receive social security but are on an elite retirement plan not available to the people, it's because they want it that way. There are no insoluble government problems. Do not let these 545 people shift the blame to bureaucrats, whom they hire and whose jobs they can abolish; to lobbyists, whose gifts and advice they can reject; to regulators, to whom they give the power to regulate and from whom they can take this power. Above all, do not let them con you into the belief that there exists disembodied mystical forces like "the economy," "inflation," or "politics" that prevent them from doing what they take an oath to do. Those 545 people, and they alone, are responsible. They, and they alone, have the power. They, and they alone, should be held accountable by the people who are their bosses. Provided the voters have the gumption to manage their own employees. We should vote all of them out of office and clean up their mess! Charlie Reese is a former columnist of the Orlando Sentinel Newspaper. What you do with this article now that you have read it.......... Is up to you. This might be funny if it weren't so darned true. Be sure to read all the way to the end: Tax his land, Tax his bed, Tax the table At which he's fed. Tax his tractor, Tax his mule, Teach him taxes Are the rule. Tax his work, Tax his pay, He works for peanuts Anyway! Tax his cow, Tax his goat, Tax his pants, Tax his coat. Tax his ties, Tax his shirt, Tax his work, Tax his dirt. Tax his tobacco, Tax his drink, Tax him if he Tries to think. Tax his cigars, Tax his beers, If he cries Tax his tears. Tax his car, Tax his gas, Find other ways To tax his ass. Tax all he has Then let him know That you won't be done Till he has no dough. When he screams and hollers; Then tax him some more, Tax him till He's good and sore. Then tax his coffin, Tax his grave, Tax the sod in Which he's laid. Put these words Upon his tomb, Taxes drove me to my doom...' When he's gone, Do not relax, Its time to apply The inheritance tax. Accounts Receivable Tax Building Permit Tax CDL license Tax Cigarette Tax Corporate Income Tax Dog License Tax Excise Taxes Federal Income Tax Federal Unemployment Tax (FUTA) Fishing License Tax Food License Tax Fuel Permit Tax Gasoline Tax (currently 44.75 cents per gallon) Gross Receipts Tax Hunting License Tax Inheritance Tax Inventory Tax IRS Interest Charges IRS Penalties (tax on top of tax) Liquor Tax Luxury Taxes Marriage License Tax Medicare Tax Personal Property Tax Property Tax Real Estate Tax Service Charge T ax Social Security Tax Road Usage Tax Sales Tax Recreational Vehicle Tax School Tax State Income Tax State Unemployment Tax (SUTA) Telephone Federal Excise Tax Telephone Federal Universal Ser vice FeeTax Telephone Federal, State and Local Surcharge Taxes Telephone Minimum Usage Surcharge=2 0Tax Telephone Recurring and Non-recurring Charges Tax Telephone State and Local Tax Telephone Usage Charge Tax Utility Taxes Vehicle License Registration Tax Vehicle Sales Tax Watercraft Registration Tax Well Permit Tax Workers Compensation Tax STILL THINK THIS IS FUNNY? Not one of these taxes existed 100 years ago, and our nation was the most prosperous in the world. We had absolutely no national debt, had the largest middle class in the world, and Mom stayed home to raise the kids. What in the hell happened? Can you spell 'politicians?' And I still have to 'press 1' for English!? I hope this goes around THE USA at least 100 times!!! YOU can help it get there!!! GO AHEAD - - - BE AN AMERICAN!!!

Interesting Parable

2009-08-01T17:53:00.001-07:00

Interesting parable (please read the entire thing to get the message):

"Once upon a time, I was invited to the White House for a private dinner with the President. I am a respected businessman, with a factory that produces memory chips for computers and portable electronics. There was some talk that my industry was being scrutinized by the administration, but I paid it no mind. I live in a free country. There’s nothing that the government can do to me if I’ve broken no laws. My wealth was earned honestly, and an invitation to dinner with an American President is an honor.
I checked my coat, was greeted by the Chief of Staff, and joined the President in a yellow dining room. We sat across from each other at a table draped in white linen. The Great Seal was embossed on the china. Uniformed staff served our dinner.
The meal was served, and I was startled when my waiter suddenly reached out, plucked a dinner roll off my plate, and began nibbling it as he walked back to the kitchen.
“Sorry about that,” said the President. “Andrew is very hungry.”
“I don’t appreciate…” I began, but as I looked into the calm brown eyes across from me, I felt immediately guilty and petty. It was just a dinner roll. “Of course,” I concluded, and reached for my glass. Before I could, however, another waiter reached forward, took the glass away and swallowed the wine in a single gulp.
“And his brother Eric is very thirsty.” said the President.
I didn’t say anything. The President is testing my compassion, I thought. I will play along. I don’t want to seem unkind.
My plate was whisked away before I had tasted a bite.
“Eric’s children are also quite hungry.”
With a lurch, I crashed to the floor. My chair had been pulled out from under me. I stood, brushing myself off angrily, and watched as it was carried from the room.
“And their grandmother can’t stand for long.”
I excused myself, smiling outwardly, but inside feeling like a fool. Obviously I had been invited to the White House to be sport for some game.. I reached for my coat, to find that it had been taken. I turned back to the President.
“Their grandfather doesn’t like the cold.”
I wanted to shout “that was my coat!” But again, I looked at the placid smiling face of my host and decided I was being a poor sport. I spread my hands helplessly and chuckled. Then I felt my hip pocket and realized my wallet was gone. I excused myself and walked to a phone on an elegant side table. I learned shortly that my credit cards had been maxed out, my bank accounts emptied, my retirement and equity portfolios had vanished, and my wife had been thrown out of our home. Apparently, the waiters and their families were moving in. The President hadn’t moved or spoken as I learned all this, but finally I lowered the phone into its cradle and turned to face him.
“Andrew’s whole family has made bad financial decisions. They haven’t planned for retirement, and they need a house. They recently defaulted on a subprime mortgage. I told them they could have your home. They need it more than you do.”
My hands were shaking. I felt faint. I stumbled back to the table and knelt on the floor. The President cheerfully cut his meat, ate his steak and drank his wine. I lowered my eyes and stared at the small gray circles on the tablecloth that were water drops.
“By the way,” He added, “I have just signed an Executive Order nationalizing your factories. I’m firing you as head of your business. I’ll be operating the firm now for the benefit of all mankind. There’s a whole bunch of Erics and Andrews out there and they can’t come to you for jobs groveling like beggars.”
I looked up. The President dropped his spoon into the empty ramekin which had been his creme brulee. He drained the last drops of his wine. As the table was cleared, he lit a cigarette and leaned back in his chair. He stared at me. I clung to the edge of the table as if were a ledge and I were a man hanging over an abyss. I thought of the years behind me, of the life I had lived. The life I had earned with a lifetime of work, risk and struggle. Why was I punished? How had I allowed it to be taken? What game had I played and lost? I looked across the table and noticed with some surprise that there was no game board between us.
What had I done wrong?
As if answering the unspoken thought, the President suddenly cocked his head, locked his empty eyes to mine, and bared a million teeth, chuckling wryly as he folded his hands.
“You should have stopped me at the dinner roll,” he said."

Stop Obama-Care Now!

2009-08-01T17:31:00.000-07:00

A good friend sent this to me...I've updated the current health care plan link from the House Ways and Means Committee

http://waysandmeans.house.gov/media/pdf/111/AAHCA09001xml.pdf

and I have read through the bill (pages listed below are where the section of concern starts, so you'll have to do a little reading for your own verification) - love the "legalese" to make sure no one really understands it, though as Rep. Conyers (MIch) stated, "I don't have to read a bill, to pass it" (that's a You Tube sensation, look it up) - it might be easier just to send your wallet/purse, and maybe you'll get to keep the "Change"

"Little "gems" hidden within the new "Health" bill: Read this and if you have concerns, then write/call your President, U.S. Representative and U.S. Senators.

http://www.usa.gov/Contact/Elected.shtml * Page 22: Mandates audits of all employers that self-insure! * Page 29: Admission: your health care will be rationed! * Page 30: A government committee will decide what treatments and benefits you get (and, unlike an insurer, there will be no appeals process) * Page 42: The "Health Choices Commissioner" will decide h ealth benefits for you. You will have no choice. None. * Page 50: All non-US citizens, illegal or not, will be provided with free healthcare services. * Page 58: Every person will be issued a National ID Healthcard. * Page 59: The federal government will have direct, real-time access to all individual bank accounts for electronic funds transfer!! * Page 65: Taxpayers will subsidize all union retiree and community organizer health plans (read: SEIU, UAW and ACORN) * Page 72: All private healthcare plans must conform to government rules to participate in a Healthcare Exchange. * Page 84: All private healthcare plans must participate in the Healthcare Exchange (i.e., total government control of private plans) * Page 91: Government mandates linguistic infrastructure for services; translation: illegal aliens * Page 95: The Government will pay ACORN and Americorps to sign up individuals for Government-run Health Care plan. Page 102: Those eligible for Medicaid will be automatically enrolled: you have no choice in the matter. * Page 124: No company can sue the government for price-fixing. No "judicial review" is permitted against the government monopoly. Put simply, private insurers will be crushed. * Page 127: The AMA sold doctors out: the government will set wages. * Page 145: An employer MUST auto-enroll employees into the government-run public plan. No alternatives. * Page 126: Employers MUST pay healthcare bills for part-time employees AND their families. * Page 149: Any employer with a payroll of $400K or more, who does not offer the public option, pays an 8% tax on payroll * Page 150: Any employer with a payroll of $250K-400K or more, who does not offer the public option, pays a 2 to 6% tax on payroll * Page 167: Any individual who doesn't' have acceptable(?) healthcare (according to the government) will be taxed 2.5% of income. * Page 170: Any NON-RESIDENT alien is exempt from individual taxes (Americans will pay for them!). * Page 195: Officers and employees of Government Healthcare Bureaucracy will have access to ALL American financial and personal records! * Page 203: "The tax imposed under this section shall not be treated as tax." Yes, it really says that. * Page 239: Bill will reduce physician services for Medicaid. Seniors and the poor are the most affected." * Page 241: Doctors: no matter what specialty you have, you'll all be paid the same (thanks, AMA!) * Page 253: Government sets value of doctors' time, their professional judgment, etc. * Page 265: Government mandates and controls productivity for private healthcare industries. * Page 268: Government regulates rental and purchase of power-driven wheelchairs. * Page 272: Cancer patients: welcome to the wonderful world of rationing! * Page 280: Hospitals will be penalized for what the government deems preventable re-admissions. * Page 298: Doctors: if you treat a patient during an initial admission that results in a readmission, you will be penalized by the government. * Page 317: Doctors: you are now prohibited for owning and investing in healthcare companies! * Page 318: Prohibition on hospital expansion. Hospitals cannot expand without government approval. * Page 321: Hospital expansion hinges on "community" input: in other words, yet another payoff for ACORN.. * Page 335: Government mandates establishment of outcome-based measures: i.e., rationing. * Page 341: Government has authority to disqualify Medicare Advantage Plans, HMOs, etc. * Page 354: Government will restrict enrollment of SPECIAL NEEDS individuals. * Page 379: More bureaucracy: Telehealth Advisory Committee (healthcare by phone). * Page 425: More bureaucracy: Advance Care Planning Consult: Senior Citizens, assisted suicide, euthanasia? * Page 425: Government will instruct and consult regarding living wills, durable powers of attorney, etc. Mandatory. Appears to lock in estate taxes ahead of time. * Page 425: Government provides approved list of end-of-life resources, guiding you in death. * Page 427: Government mandates program that orders end-of-life treatment; government dictates how your life ends. * Page 429: Advance Care Planning Consult will be used to dictate treatment as patient's health deteriorates. This can include an ORDER for end-of-life plans......an ORDER from the GOVERNMENT to END YOUR LIFE!!! * Page 430: Government will decide what level of treatments you may have at end-of-life. * Page 469: Community-based Home Medical Services: more payoffs for ACORN. * Page 472: Payments to Community-based organizations: more payoffs for ACORN. * Page 489: Government will cover marriage and family therapy. Government intervenes in your marriage. * Page 494: Government will cover mental health services: defining, creating and rationing those services. Again, here's the link to the actual bill as it sits:
http://waysandmeans.house.gov/media/pdf/111/AAHCA09001xml.pdf"

And I almost missed another gem on page 114 of the health care bill (Affordable Health Choices Act) - Congress is exempt from this whole health care package (just like most of the other laws they've brought up):

From World Net Daily (July 23, 2009)

"If government-run health care is such a great idea, why won't members of Congress enroll their own families?
The question has been on the minds of many Americans, but Democrats aren't giving answers. Instead, they are exempting themselves from their own health care "reform."
The Affordable Health Choices Act drafted by Sen. Edward Kennedy's staff and the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee pushes "Americans into stingy insurance plans with tight, HMO-style controls," the Wall Street Journal reports.
At the same time, Page 114 of the act specifically exempts members of Congress from the public plan.
The bill mandates that all other Americans enroll in "qualified" health plans and submit proof of enrollment to the government.
Everyone must report "the name, address, and taxpayer identification number of each individual who is covered under health insurance that is qualifying coverage" and include the "number of months during the calendar year during which each such individual was covered under such health insurance," along with "such other information as the Secretary may prescribe."
Under his plan for health "reform," President Obama has promised Americans that citizens will have the same health care options members of Congress receive. During his presidential campaign, he told an audience in Canton, Ohio, in October 2008: "If you don't have health insurance, you'll be able to get the same kind of health insurance that members of Congress give themselves."
At a news conference June 23, Obama said people will be able to choose their insurance "the same way that federal employees do, same way that members of Congress do."
According to the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, "Federal employees, retirees and their survivors enjoy the widest selection of health plans in the country. You can choose from among Consumer-Driven and High Deductible plans that offer catastrophic risk protection with higher deductibles, health savings/reimbursable accounts and lower premiums, or Fee-for-Service (FFS) plans, and their Preferred Provider Organizations (PPO), or Health Maintenance Organizations (HMO) if you live (or sometimes if you work) within the area serviced by the plan."