Monday, April 25, 2011

The Ideal World Obama and his Friends want for you

While this view of our society has not been presented to the public in this detail, it has been presented in portions here and there by those who support Mr. Obama's socialist view. Some readers may object to some items in this list as undocumented, but rest assured, they have been published in proposed legislation or articles written by his supporters or current cabinet members.

In the society that Mr. Obama and his friends want you to live in, many choices you are free to exercise today, would not be available to you.

Easily half of your income would go to the federal, state, county, or city governments.
Taxes will be everywhere.
There will be a tax on your income,
a tax on your savings accounts,
a tax on things you buy,
a tax on things you sell,
a tax on every financial transaction you make,
a tax on things you own,
a tax on your electricity,
a tax on your house gas,
a tax on your internet,
a tax on your TV cable,
a tax on your phone line or cellphone,
a tax on your sewer line,
a tax on how much water your use,
a tax on the gasoline you use in your car,
a tax on the oil you use in your car,
a tax on the tires you buy for your car,
and tax on the size and kind of car you drive.
(You may notice that you already pay many of these taxes.)

In return, you would receive many requirements from various levels of government that would control many activities you participate in now.

You could receive medical care from government offices.
This medical care would be rationed by the government based on your age, the cost of the particular procedure requested, and limited facilities available to provide the requested procedure.
You might request a particular surgical operation but the government may only allow you to receive a drug to “control” the problem.
You would have no choice in how much you pay for you medical care – the cost would be controlled by a board of bureaucrats in washington DC.
You would not have a choice about whether to pay your medical care tax or not.
If you do not pay it, you will be fined.

For those who can afford it, dozens of free-enterprise-based medical communities will have developed along the southern border of the United States in Mexico.
This reactive free-enterprise zone will populated by thousands of American doctors and staff, who offer virtually any procedure or treatment needed by their mostly-American clientele.
This phenomenon will be matched by other similar medical communities in other nearby Latin-american and Caribbean countries for the same purpose.

You could build a new house, but where and how would be closely controlled.
Federal regulations would dictate the type of toilets, the size and placement of windows and doors, the type and size of heating and air conditioning equipment, the amount and type of insulation you could install, the type of materials and paint you could install.
Federal regulations may limit the colors you may choose to paint the outside of your house.

Most people will live in government-controlled apartments or houses.
Most landlords will be put out of business by government-mandated requirements for “fair housing” or “energy efficiency”.

Your utilities will be controlled by the government.
If your house, on a hot or cold day, uses more electricity than the government deems proper, it can turn off your electricity for whatever period of time it dictates.
If you use more water than the government has determined is appropriate for your size house or family, it can turn off your water for the rest of the day.
The government will tell you when you may operate your clothes dryer, washer and other appliances.
If you own an older house, the government will specify the type of windows, insulation, heating/AC, and appliances it must have before you will be allowed to sell it.
The owner will be required to bear the cost of these required improvements.
Wood-burning stoves would be illegal – even in mountain cabins in remote locations.

Most of your electricity will come from wind-driven power-generating machines or solar conversion farms.
On windless or cloudy days, electricity will be rationed.
The cost of this “green” electricity will be three to four times what it is today.
Coal-fired power plants will be shut down or used only as back-up when the “green” machines cannot meet power demand.
No new coal-fired power-generating plants will be built.
(But the United States will export coal to other nations of the world who seek it.)
No new nuclear-based power generating plants will be built in the United States.
(But Canada and Mexico will build both coal-fired and nuclear-based power-generating plants near our borders, and sell the power to the U.S.)

Domestic oil production will be reduced to a trickle because of restricted drilling license requirement.
Most gasoline will be imported from the middle east or other countries.
Gasoline will cost $10 to $20 a gallon.
Most people will not own cars or trucks.
Busses or trains will move most people in larger cities.
The number of car companies will be reduced by half as will the number of models each company markets.
Cars will be reduced in size and power to meet increasingly stringent fuel economy requirements.
Cross-country travel by personal vehicle will be reduced to half of what it is today or less.

Air travel will be limited to only the most wealthy.
Many airports will be shut down, or reduced to cargo-only terminals.

Because of the heavy tax burden, unemployment will be a massive 25-30 percent.
Because of the large proportion of people unemployed and living in government-controlled housing, crime will be rampant.
Drug distribution and ethnic gangs will control certain areas of cities and towns.
Since personal gun ownership will have been made illegal, only criminals will possess guns.
Jails and prisons will be overflowing with criminals.
Assaults, rapes and murders will be a daily occurrence in many cities and towns.
Gated communities with armed guards will be a common feature of many cities and towns.

Government schools will be reduced to unionized baby-sitting facilities.
Learning will be relegated to a second priority after safety for the few remaining students.
Drug use, sexual promiscuity, open homosexuality, gangs and bullying will overwhelm public school systems.
With little disposable income, most parents will have no choice but to subject their children to the diminished instructional value and personal insecurity of the public school systems.
Private schools will be taxed and required to teach government-mandated curriculum, devised by the teachers unions.
These same public teachers unions will have prevailed upon federal and state legislative bodies to outlaw home school organizations and/or require the inclusion of government-mandated curriculum, to include state-controlled testing to ensure that the state-mandated subject matter was presented.

But this scenario will not last for long.
The shear magnitude of the cost of the government-run programs and the ever-shrinking economy will combine to produce a massive collapse of the American economy by 2020.
.

Sunday, April 17, 2011

AN EMOTIONAL INVESTMENT

This phrase came to me soon after I heard the news that someone I was close to had died.
The news was a shock.
She was only 45 years old.

I am not sure how we came to meet her or know her situation.
It was 1984 or so.
She was 15 at the time and having family problems, personal problems, and, not surprisingly, spiritual problems.
There were problems with drugs and sex and alcohol – serious issues for a fifteen year old.
Things that I was not sure I knew how to help with.
I also was sure God could help her, but it would take her cooperation.
That was not a sure thing at the outset.

With the permission of her mother, and the girl's consent, we agreed to take her in.
I do not know how we came to this decision.
She lived with us for about two years.
Soon after she moved in she received salvation and began living the strict way we followed.
About the same time, God gave me a father's love for the girl.
This was misunderstood by nearly everyone around us – including my wife.
But it did not matter to me.
I knew what God had given me, and I knew how it shaped my relationship with the girl.
There was never anything inappropriate in me toward her.
Never.
I loved her as my daughter.
I did my best to build a relationship with her.
I wanted her to have a father that she could trust and respect.

We went through several emotional and spiritual episodes with her in those two years or so.
She ran away once.
Only to be found by that evening.
The question to her then was, “do you want to go home to live with your mother, or do you want to continue to stay with us?”
She elected to stay, even with the understanding that the relationship would now be different.
She stayed and blossomed again.

At one point we even considered adopting her.
This was discussed with her mother.
I do not remember why we did not follow through with the idea, but it was never pursued to completion.

Time passed.
Circumstances in her family changed and finally, the girl felt that she needed to return to her mother.
We understood.
It was hard to see her go.
It would be a spiritual challenge for her, as well.
Minutes after she had driven off with her mother, I remember sitting on her bed with my oldest son, who was about eight years old at the time, crying.
He wanted to know why she had to go.
I had no answer that could ease his tears or mine.
That was around 1985 or 1986.

It was not long before she stopped coming to church.
For part of the time she was with us I went through a clinical depression that lasted about two years, I gradually recovered.
To this day, I do not understand exactly why this happened to me.
It was one of the most bizarre times in my life.

About thirteen or fourteen years later, because of some (more) personal problems, she moved in with us for a couple of weeks.
She had a daughter then, who was about 12 or so.
This meeting was different for several reasons.
She was less pliable spiritually and less inclined to conform to the same strict standards we still followed.
She was an adult now.
She was not the confused, scared girl we had known before.
My wife and I, were having our own problems.
We were both interested in helping her, but the help we could provide would be different than our last encounter with her.
When she left us this time, it was the last time I would see her alive.

Then came the news this week – she was dead.
Suddenly.
Seemingly without a cause.
It had been years since I had seen her. (12?)
And I had gone months or years at a time without thinking of her.
But as soon as the sad news came to me, my mind flooded with memories of her and her time with our family.
I was surprised at the strength of my mental and emotional reaction to it.

That is when I realized the concept of Emotional Investment.
I had given her my heart – in a fatherly way, and she, in turn, had loved me and respected me as a father.
My wife had done the same, I am sure.
My wife and I had stood up to her when she had disobeyed, showing her the unconditional love she had failed to receive from her natural father.
She had submitted to the rules of the family.
Our children had loved and adopted her also.
The Emotional Investment was shared among us.

It had come from time spent with one another.
Sharing, opening up, giving, receiving, growing – individually and together.
And even though you separate and even forget about the person, you never really get away from the Emotional Investment you have made.
It is true of parents and children.
It is true of husbands and wives.
It is something that can sleep as if dormant, but just the mention of her name, and the depth and magnitude of the Emotional Investment comes alive again.
And you feel the love and commitment you gave and shared.

I felt it as I looked at the body of the woman in the casket today.
I never thought I would be in this situation.
But I was.
Looking at a woman that I had given my heart to as a father, so many years ago. (25)
Part of me did not want to look.
It was too painful.
I did not want to see her like this.

Another part of me wanted to see her again.
To rip the scab off my heart and feel the blood flowing and the pain again.
And tell her that her “other” daddy still loves her.

Her life did not turn out to be the one I had prayed for.
She never found happiness with a man, that I know of.
She continued to have problems with alcohol and drugs off and on, I heard.
And she never returned to the spiritual peace she once had, that I know of.

While some of this can be attributed to the traumatic events of her early teen years, much of it is the result of decisions she made.
She chose this life.
She chose a life that would end this way.
In spite of what the preacher said today, I do not believe she was saved.
I wish I could say otherwise.
And I hope I am wrong.
God knows for sure.
But just going on what I know about her life in recent years, I see an unhappy, unfulfilled life.
I wanted something better than this for her.
And that is part of what I did not want to see today.
An Emotional Investment is costly.

Friday, April 01, 2011

American Negrocentrism

Lately I was impressed with how many laws, social customs, legal and financial elements in contemporary American society have been affected by the minority Negro population here. To be more precise, many practices and processes of American society have been altered from a normal color-blind pattern of operation, based on the merits of each individual transaction, to an unbalanced distorted process imposed either by government or certain groups in society to avoid possible discrimination against those members of society with dark skin. This has caused an opposite effect where many operations and processes are openly tilted to favor the negro minority in this country.

Let me say up front that it is true that in times past, the negro population of this country has been treated poorly by some elements of the white population. Sadly, this was true even into the 1970's. Most of the black people who came to the United States in the first 100 years or so of our history did not come here by choice. Or at least, did not arrive here with the same freedom to choose their destiny that most of the caucasian population did.

Most of them were shipped here as slaves – as property – to be bought and sold by their owners, as they would a mule or shovel. Some slave owners were horribly cruel to their slaves, others were more kind, most were somewhere in between. There are plenty of stories of all types to document these statements.

But let's put some things in perspective. Slavery is not unique to the United States in the 1700 to mid-1800's. Slavery is nearly as old as mankind. It is a fact of history that the stronger of two families/clans/tribes/societies/nations will sometimes subjugate the weaker. It was happening before the United States came into existence. It is happening now around the world in various places. And Negros are not the only race being subjugated, then or now. In many cases, it has been African groups who enslaved other Africans.

Thus, the negro slavery experience in the United States was no better or worse than that of many other people in other places or times. This is not meant to diminish the inhumanity of it, but to provide some balance to a subject that has been distorted and perpetuated beyond its reality.

None of this is stated to diminish the repugnant circumstances that slavery entails. It is repulsive to me now and has been since I learned of it as a child. This was generally true in early America as well. Most Americans were not comfortable with the institution of slavery in their territory and many worked diligently to end it. Elections were won or lost because of the issue, laws were passed in new territories and states to prohibit its spread outside of the southern states. But it took a war to force an end to the social and economic system that had developed in the south. And in one sense, the social and economic wounds of the period of slavery in the United States have never healed. We are living with them to this day. Hence, this paper.

Basically, many customs of society and policies of governments in the United States revolve around the negro minority in this nation. The lingering white guilt over our past regional experiment with slavery has caused policies and customs of our entire nation to revolve around our relatively small negro population. In a real sense, this residual guilt and constant remembrance has stood American society on it head.

Consider this: when one buys a house, part of the transaction is a government-mandated certification by the lender that it did not discriminate in its selection process because the skin color of the applicant. This is done to force banks to provide loans to some people who cannot afford to pay them back or, if governed strictly by rules of prudent risk evaluation, would not be given a loan in the amount requested. But banks were forced to do this under threat that their charters would not be renewed by federal regulators if they did not engage in such risky transactions.

Companies must certify to the government under pain of large fines and/or lawsuits that they hire a certain percentage of black applicants. The code term was “affirmative action”. In reality it is simply compulsory hiring of unqualified people with dark skin. In a similar way, companies must go through rigorous and extensive steps to fire a black employee because of these same laws.

I personally know of one black-skinned person who was kept on the payroll of a large corporation for years because she threatened to sue the company for racial discrimination if they tried to dismiss her. She was incompetent, surly, uncooperative, and lazy. She did what she was asked if she felt like it and did nothing when that suited her. I personally saw her engaged in both types of activities at various times.

Colleges have developed reverse discrimination “affirmative action” programs to ensure that they have a certain percentage of black students attending their institution, even though many of these students are not academically qualified. They are there BECAUSE they have black skin, not because of their scholastic abilities. This is a monumental insult to negro students who DO have sufficient academic abilities to attend such institutions. The dropout rate of these AA trophy students is 85 percent. A testimony to the complete failure of these type of programs to produce anything other than theatrics for the media. These are the same people who have tried to stand the laws of economics and society on their head to enforce outcome-based programs in other areas.

Virtually all federal welfare programs are aimed at the poor portion of our negro minority. We have spent trillions of dollars funding housing, food, rental assistance, recreational facilities/programs, and job training programs for them. While it is true that some white families benefit from these programs, the majority of the recipients are black. Their proportion of participation in taxpayer-financed welfare programs is far out of proportion to their percentage of the overall population.

In addition to taxpayer-financed welfare programs, the negro population receives a large proportion of taxpayer-financed services in the criminal justice system. A greater percentage of black-skinned people are criminals than all other races in this country, as measured as a percentage of each racial group. Fully, twenty percent of all black men have a criminal record. This is double the average for other racial groups in the U.S.

Crime in many negro neighborhoods is rampant (and is spread outside them, as well). Some areas are so dangerous, that the police do not go in them during certain times. To this problem, billions of taxpayer dollars are spent on combating negro crime, out of proportion to that spent on crime by other individual racial groups.

There are special programs in government contracting to ensure that “minority-owned” companies are given PREFERENCE in the bidding for government contracts. Thus, a company that is not qualified to bid on a government contract because it does not have the capacity or expertise can be granted the contract simply because it is owned by a person with black skin. Again, “reverse discrimination” has stood normal economic processes on their head.

Fear of negro advocacy groups has abrogated some of our constitutional rights. For instance, when a local Housing Authority seeks to buy a property in a neighborhood (it is understood that the authority is going to place a negro family there because that is what they usually do), the citizens of that neighborhood cannot reverse the decision for fear that a lawsuit be filed by the federal Housing and Urban Development agency or the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Thus, the very fundamental operation of democracy is halted, for fear of Negro-centric legal action.

These social, economic and political distortions are primarily aimed at the American negro population. The Asian-american people do not need such social/economic crutches from the government to be successful in our society. Immigrants from India do not need such special hand-outs to be successful in our society. Most Latino immigrants to this nation, legal AND illegal, do not need any special social or economic provisions to become successful in American society. In fact, the fact that so many Latino immigrants choose to sneak into this country illegally is proof that American society is basically color/race-blind and will assimilate anyone willing to work to pay their own way. These non-black people settle into poor neighborhoods and begin work or school and gradually work their way up and out of the poorer areas and into middle class neighborhoods, with little or no government assistance.

The wording in many programs may say “racial” but most people see that its application is skewed toward “negro”. And, yes, other racial groups benefit from these programs to some degree, so the politicians and the networks can say, they were not just thinking of their most vocal and self-conscious minority constituency.

While I do not consider myself a “racist”, there are many people – both white and black – who will disagree. Most of these people are not objective on the matter. They have a vested interest in perpetuating a negro race-sensitive awareness in society. For it is with this negro hyper-sensitivity that they achieve and maintain power over both black and white portions of the American society. They are the new slave masters of America.

Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton and their white apologists need a perceived poor, suffering black population on which to stand to build their power. They need to constantly remind as much of the the black population as possible that they are still poor slaves because of the racist, rich white people who control the economy and seek to keep them poor. This is exactly what “reverend” Jeremiah Wright preaches. And these people need to constantly perpetuate the guilt of the white population by reminding them of the misdeeds of their ancestors. Through this dual deception, these leaders perpetuate the slave mentality in the black minority and the guilt-generated financing by the white population.

Any comments perceived as undermining their distortion of the racial situation in this nation is immediately, and loudly, labeled as “racist”. This epithet is enthusiastically disbursed by the news media because it will increase viewer interest for a day or two or three, and thus, prop up advertising rates. Thus, perpetuating the “racist” myth, is good for business. And no politician wants to receive such a label, no matter how absurdly applied. And it is almost universally applied to Republicans by the media and those whose power base is the downtrodden negro masses, who still believe it is their lot in life to be poor.

It is the reason that Rush Limbaugh was fired from an ESPN sports program because he stated that the reason player Donavan McNabb did not receive more criticism for his poor performance was because he was black. The statement, while just an opinion, was probably true, but virtually no one accepted the statement on its merits. All that could be seen or heard was the blind screeching of the New Slave Masters on the news networks of, “racist”.

It should be stated for further clarity and balance, that many Americans with black skin are not part of these distortions. This group could be as much as half the black population in the United States. Many have risen from poor beginnings to become productive members of our society. They do not see themselves as once-removed slaves and doomed to be wards of the state. Many grew up in middle class homes and have a value system dissimilar from those who live in the urban projects on the public dole. Children of these families are more focused on academics and career. And the young men know how to dress so that their pants stay above their buttocks.

Those in the previous paragraph notwithstanding, because of all of the above-mentioned distortions, it is sadly ironic that many Negros have become economic slaves to the white tax-paying population. The very outcome they have been (over)promised, and which then seek to avoid has been built around them by their leaders and “protectors”. A significant proportion of black Americans see themselves as unable - or are unwilling - to join with the productive majority of society, and are content to live off of the provisions given to them by guilt-responsive white politicians funded by the taxes paid by the majority of the white population.

So, in a sense, nothing has changed since 1860, except that negro slavery is no longer limited to 15 southern states.

ON BEING A JANITOR

April 15 th of 2013 was my last year to work for HR Block. I disliked the corporate pressure to make us call customers to try to sel...