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In his hit song, “Somebody’s Crying”, Chris Isaak laments that somebody’s lying; it’s a great song and a lyrical wonder by a truly gifted artist. It’s sad but true that in life we cry when someone lies to us, especially when it’s someone you love; so America, by now you should have cried oceans of tears as that someone is your own country, or more accurately, your own government.

I recently read that most of mass media relies on statistics based on what people click on social media to determine what they will print, and how to present it. The usual field is about a million of the most recent from which they will take about the top one to two percent. Most of the “Woke” movement is found on social media, so its migration to mass media is not hard to understand. The publisher’s motivation, besides their political and social leanings, is profits, i.e. income from advertisers; it’s what sells that matters, not what is true.  The result is the suppression of facts and the marginalization of contrarian views, a kind of journalistic cancel culture. Those that don’t fit in the program are either disregarded with whatever label is deemed the current villain, like “racists”, “fascists”, “oppressors”, “privileged”, “sexists”, “ableists”, etc., or simply fired.

A good friend recently told me that people just don’t want to read a lot anymore; newspapers that post articles that go beyond the front page are not as popular as tabloids. So while the above may seem a new phenomenon, it’s really just a variation on an old theme. Lies and labels are the tools of ochlocracies and autocrats, demagogues and dictators, in the sordid history of partisan politics. Think about America’s history just about a century back with all the stuff we were told to believe that was pure nonsense; true, we could go back further, but there’s plenty of material in this time frame.

Try the Spanish American War; “Remember the Maine!” was the cry.  The historical fact is that it was a faulty boiler explosion that sunk the Maine, not Spanish sabotage. Lots of people died in that fabricated conflict.  Yes, somebody was lying, so there was a lot of crying.

Then we have the 1913 Federal Reserve Act, to create a central bank to help stabilize our economy.  Really great job depreciating the USD by 96% to today’s value; now that has to be one of the great lies of all time, and sadly one many still believe. Imagine telling people for more than a century that inflation is a good thing while they wake up day after day with the dollar they have constantly worth less; no imagination needed, the lie continues while the cries go ignored. 

Then we have the 16^th amendment, providing for a tax formerly prohibited by the constitution, an amendment the history of which is loaded with as many lies as there were states voting on ratification. Contrary to what many conservatives say today, and many people believe, it was not proposed by the Democrats under Wilson, but by Republicans under Taft. The ratification process had so many irregularities that provide some very interesting questions which have never been resolved.  It also did not provide for payroll withholding at all; that was an FDR manipulation to fund his New Deal. One lie on top of another, and we really need a good cry.

Then we have the Great War, the “War to End All Wars”. The US joined the slaughter because the Germans attacked the Lusitania, a British passenger ship that was carrying munitions and with Americans on board.  That was not the story line reported, so someone was lying. About 4.7M Americans were involved in that war, of which about a half million died, were wounded or suffered from diseases in the trenches; that war should be renamed the “Great Lie”.

What followed the Great War were two catastrophic events that were to lead to so many more deaths. One was the Spanish Flu, which was named not because of its origins as many were told (Spain was neutral in WWI), but mysteriously out of an Army post in Indiana as later reported. Actually not so mysterious as the soldiers there were returning from the horrors of the “Trench Warfare” (more like sewers) of WWI, most likely the origins of this multimillion people killer; big lies cause big cries.

The second catastrophic event of WWI was the Treaty of Versailles, so vengeful and destructive, creating the social cesspool from which Hitler, Franco, Mussolini and Stalin arose. There are so many contrived reasons given for the rise of such dictators, most ignoring the social and economic chaos created by WWI, the Versailles Treaty and the pandemic that followed that we have to wonder at the gullibility of not just those lied to, but the liars themselves. The politicians that caused these horrible events must have lied to themselves to concoct and promote such vacuous reasoning, but the people cried from the suffering they caused.

Then we have the Great Depression.  We were told the causes were things like speculation, unregulated banking, stock market manipulation, etc. Missing of course was the real culprit of what today we would call “accommodative monetary and fiscal policy”, i.e. massive liquidity providing the boom and bust cycle we have come to take for granted, this one particularly chaotic.  We were told that FDR had a plan, the New Deal, to save the country, but it was a raw deal that made things worse; we were told it was for the greater good, and that was really lying, so we kept on crying. The New Deal did nothing to abate the Great Depression, but in fact prolonged it; sadly it was WWII that did more to end it than FDR’s irresponsible policies ever did; now that’s something to really cry about.

The beginning of America as a “Warfare State” really took flight with the Korean War, called at the time the “Korean Conflict”, which we somehow had to get involved with to stop socialism and Red China’s aggression. It was actually a civil war, but that was not the acceptable spin, and so again someone lied, many people died, and many people cried.

But why stop there? Liars love spin, and with the “Gulf of Tonkin Incident” you get a really big lie, and with Viet Nam you get a really big cry. In order to stop a fantasy “Domino Effect” we get the lie that bankrupted a generation and caused a social eruption that fractured a nation, and I’m not talking Viet Nam, I’m referring to the US.

Of course we can’t leave out one of my favorite lies, the “Weapons of Mass Destruction” of Iraq. So much a catchy phrase that we gave it initials, “WMD”. Apparently we’re good at that, but not seeing the big lie it was, and after more than a decade of “Nation Building” there and twenty plus years in Afghanistan, we hear stupid stuff like “mission accomplished”; yeah, killing thousands of innocent civilians not to mention US soldiers is quite an accomplishment, together with the inevitable bankruptcy it will contribute to. The bigger the lie, the longer we will cry.  

But we’re even better at the big lies economically, as in the “Financial Crisis”. Now even the name is a lie, it was an intelligence crisis.  We create the bubbles and wonder why they burst, and then we come up with an even bigger lie; we call it “Quantitative Easing”, and in true form we give it initials, QE, because we’re too damn lazy to say the entire phrase, more honestly being corporate bailouts.

Needless to say, the Trump Era (which may not be over yet) saw abundant lying, like the wall against immigration, Russian interference if not collusion, Ukrainian coercion, and of course voter fraud. Amazingly, the crying was more from those in denial of anything that Trump did wrong, but on the other hand, the hypocrisy from those who so dramatically expressed offense yet provided little in the way of meaningful and effective action. It was a circus of lies and ineptitude, but I think the most hurtful crying may still await us.

So true to form, when presented by what we call a “pandemic” for Covid, a true stretch of terms considering a world death toll nearing 0.05% compared to the Black Plague that claimed a death toll of somewhere (best guesses) between 21% to 57% of the world’s population, or more recently the Spanish Flu with a .10% death toll. We were told we needed to “flatten the curve” by cancelling all economic activity for just a few months; that then became a few more, and now we have more than a year and a half, killing the livelihood of millions, likely eventually killing many more than the pandemic itself. 

So when you lie, you find the need to keep lying in the hope of covering up your previous lies, which of course leads to the need to perpetuate the lies, ad infinitum, ad nauseam. Now we have the “American Recovery”, as if the very idiots that caused a massive economic catastrophe can somehow bring us to a so called recovery. There’s no Heimlich maneuver for that, but lies are the tonic for fools.

Remember Judy Mikovits? She was the scientist who took records from the NIH that would reportedly expose Fauci’s involvement with NIH funding of the Wuhan Lab’s chimeric experiments with Covid viruses. She was arrested without a warrant, detained and then released, but only after those records were retrieved. What we have now are insistent news stories into the origins of Coivd at those same labs, and an apparent US funding for its research. I wonder what lies await us.

We are told that green energy will lead to a cleaner environment, but what we are told is not supported by basic science and engineering, which informs us that the highest efficiency possible for conversion of the sun’s photons to electrons is 33%, and for wind 60%. Currently our best solar panels have a 26% conversion, and wind turbines 45%, so we are getting closer to maximum efficiency. However, the input to produce solar panels, wind turbines and electric car batteries takes ten times the quantity of materials compared with building machines using hydrocarbons to deliver the same amount of energy.

We also have the disposal issue; by 2050 the quantity of expired and non-recyclable solar panels will double the tonnage of all of today’s global plastic waste, along with over 3 million tons per year of unrecyclable plastics from worn-out wind turbine blades. By 2030, more than 10 million tons per year of batteries will become garbage. Now all this is not to say that we shouldn’t strive for cleaner energy, but to propose trillions of dollars of government funds to invest in technologies that are not only less efficient but actually require more mining of materials and produce more waste does not actually translate as a cleaner alternative.

No doubt the end of the internal combustion engine is inevitable given the accelerating rate of technological progress, but the alternatives being promoted by the cronies of government subsidies are far from sustainable; lies get access to the taxpayer’s pockets, but crying about that does not seem to impress the power elite. 

Lying and crying will not change facts, so Americans need to get the truth and get it out there for all to see. As John Adams said “Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.”

“A man who does not think for himself does not think at all.” Oscar Wilde

Often in life we are asked the simple question “So what do you think?” The issue at hand can be business, a friend seeking advice as to some problem they’re having, or just what’s going on with your favorite baseball team. None of the issues matter, what matters is what you think. But do we answer correctly if all we’re doing is providing opinions or beliefs? Actually were not as those things aren’t what we’re thinking, but are what someone else is writing or saying we should be thinking.

So what does it mean to think? This is not meant as a deep philosophical question, but something that is basically common sense. Try to remember the last time you were faced with a problem and despite all the advice you were given, whether you asked for it or not, you decided to move past all that conventional wisdom and came to your own conclusion as what to do based on your own experiences. I wonder what the reactions were of those that gave their advice you did not take?

True thinking is definitely something that is not what many say it is.  It is not opinion as that is something subjective and usually founded on the absence of factual information. Take for instance opinion polls.  All too often the polls show that people’s opinions are based more on what they read and hear others say about whatever the subject of the poll may be. As an example, consider the pool on COVID19 vaccines wherein many hold the opinion that it causes infertility in women. While there is still much research needed on these vaccines, this opinion is contrary to factual information.

Neither is belief based on true thinking. Belief is a “thought” that some have decided is true; it does not require facts, but it does require faith that what we believe is true even in the absence of a factual basis. Thinking on the other hand requires facts, which are irrefutable pieces of information. The trick of course is determining the irrefutable.

So back to the question as to what it means to think. In his last interview in 1996, Carl Sagan said “Science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge.” Taking that word “science”, derived from the Latin word “scientia”, which actually means knowledge or experience, we only need our common sense to understand what really thinking is, i.e. that which we know is fact based on our own experience; everything else is opinion or belief, usually based on what others have said or written.

Is thinking something that can be taught? Based on my own experience, I think so, but that doesn’t mean it necessarily is the only way to learn how to think. While I’m no fan of much that John Dewey represents, he was a humanist who actively supported independent thinking.  It is still odd that as a self-proclaimed Democratic Socialist he said that “The children who know how to think for themselves spoil the harmony of the collective society.” Thinking for oneself is viewed as disruptive by conformist cultures and authoritarian societies, but by its nature, thinking is an empirical process, and since no two people have the same life experiences, how can it be possible for all people to always really think alike?

To put it as simply as George S. Patton did, “If everyone is thinking alike, then somebody isn’t thinking.”

Recently a close relative sent me a transcript of Bill Maher’s diatribe at the close of his recent show about how America has become a nation of silly people. Maher used China as a comparative foil to illustrate how we’ve become so focused on meaningless things like renaming stuff, or self-destructive policies like eliminating merit, or woke insanity like debating if Mr. Potato Head has a penis, that we are losing the battle for the future.

While he described questionable feats of infrastructural engineering as fact, he failed to mention that China has built some cities that are vacant, and only briefly acknowledged the atrocities committed against the Uyghur Muslims, his point does have validity regarding the societal silliness that pervades much of our national dialogue.

However, Maher fails the freedom test when he proposes that “There’s got to be something between an authoritarian government that tells everyone what to do and a representative government that can’t do anything at all.” This kind of thinking is what got us into the silliness sink hole to begin with. The woke movement, while silly in so many ways, is also dangerous in a very insidious way. It presupposes that there is but one way to think about everything, and if you don’t agree with that you’re up for cancellation. It really doesn’t matter if such authoritarianism comes from a central committee or a majoritarian occult.

But the message that Maher’s rant provides needs to be considered even if it has these flaws.  America was once a very serious country, and like most imperfect in many ways.  That we were capable of seeing and freely talking about our faults is what made for a civil society, which created tolerance for others who may think and live differently than ourselves. What has happened in America is a decline in civility, the absence of the live and let live ethos where now we must all think alike, even about whether or not Dr. Seuss books need a dose of revisionism. We are replacing what is important to think about with hardly thinking at all; yes, that is a silly people.

It is also true of Maher’s rant that China, while still politically repressive, has made incredible progress since it allowed a more free market. China will continue having growing pains as the results of a free market collide with its statist politics. What still baffles me is how America, with about a fifth of China’s population, remains the largest economy in the world.  That may not last too much longer as China’s economy continues to grow; its outsized population alone is a key factor driving that reality.

The dynamism of the American economy was due to the synergy of a free society and a free market; the two elements were inseparable and essential for its economic dominance.  As we politically veer toward more authoritarianism and economic interventionism, coupled with our insatiable military adventurism that depletes our financial and human resources, our dynamism will decline at the same time as China’s could exponentially rise.

China does not dwell on social justice; fact is it doesn’t really dwell on justice much at all.  It is all about results and at any costs. There is no pluralism in China. If you are not ethnically a Han, which represents nearly 92% of the population, you are treated as a second class citizen, or worse like the Uyghurs. This has been the way in China long before Mao and there is little indication that will change anytime soon. If you are not in harmony with The State Council, the central governing body, politically controlled by the Chinese Communist Party, you will find yourself in a pretty bad place as the people in Hong Kong know all too well.

In recent US media articles and congressional hearings, praise was expressed for how China handles the internet.  Now talk about how silly Americans can be, we the champions of free speech and expression, literally “kowtowing” to a repressive regime like China. This was not a polarizing moment by the way as both political parties are guilty of such obscene behavior. China’s motivation for such censorship is obvious, but what are leaders in a free press and representative government thinking when they say such silly things; perhaps, they are not thinking at all, or perhaps only thinking of how they too can control people.

These tendencies to undermine what made America such a dynamic country is worse than silly, it’s self-destructive. It ignores or denigrates our heritage, both the good and the bad; we need to understand the differences in order to focus on what it takes to make things better. You can’t change the past, and to make a better future you have to live in the present, not some silly Bizarro World where you hold the living responsible for things that happened before they were even born.

You will not see China practice such self-deprecation; they’re all about moving forward, albeit in lockstep if they know what’s good for them. America used to be all about the future.  Now we seem stuck in a hopeless time trap about making amends for things that happened that we had little if anything to do with; there’s no vision in that, and therefore no way to live productively. While it’s important to learn from history, it’s even more important to put what you learn to work for you.

For example, many of today’s financial news reporters were gushing about how many people found jobs last month, far more than expected. Some of the more observant and serious reporters, while positive about the good news, noted the more sobering reality that this was not about real growth but an economy opening up again.  One of the important details they stressed was that many of the jobs will not be coming back as companies are learning the benefits of the technology they had to live with during the lock downs; the future for mindless and repetitive labor means fewer lower end jobs. This was already true pre-pandemic; it just accelerated out of necessity. People will need to change with the times and learn new skills in this technological revolution, or be left behind. It’s no different than what happened during the Industrial Revolution, an historical lesson in creative destruction.  China sees this and is not getting caught up in myopic thinking about how to keep antiquated jobs on life support in order to appease a segment of its labor force. Here in the US, the cronyism between unions and government is continuing to be a drag on real economic progress; another example of what silly people do.

When President Macron of France in a recent speech rejected the woke movement in the US, stating that France needs to focus on and embrace what really matters in life, you know that when such criticism comes from the French you must really look silly in the eyes of the world. The US needs to get serious again and embrace our heritage of ingenuity, productivity, and a great work ethic, and shed this miasma of silly thinking and reject the government’s efforts to make us dependent on their stimulus. After all, it’s our future at stake, and that’s no silly matter.

It would be comical reading and listening to all the madness in Albany about the passage of marijuana legalization until you consider the actual bill and the back story that it tells.  The lack of understanding what they are dealing with makes the NYS legislators appear like they have had one too many joints themselves while drafting this bill. 

Now there are plenty of examples of what other states have done and the results to have informed them of the situation they are dealing with, but politicians seldom if ever consider the consequences of their actions, and this is no exception. While I am all for ending the stupidity of the war on drugs, anyone with a modicum of common sense will see the various ways this bill will do little to change the situation.

The bill legalizes the recreational use of marijuana as long as it is distributed in a proscribed manner by dispensaries licensed to do so.  We already have the New York State Liquor Authority, and now we have the New York State Office of Cannabis Management.  The history of alcohol control in the US with the Prohibition and the criminal activity it spawned should have been informative enough to have ended the war on drugs before it even started.

Consider the fact that since Nixon declared a “war on drugs”, with the goal being the eradication of drug use, interdiction of any distribution, and the incarceration of all involved, there has been no progress if measured by results given the ever increasing market, all for the tax payers’ bill of $51B/year, and you have to wonder what hallucinatory drugs legislators are on to think they can control the cannabis market.

The situation with marijuana is quite different from that with alcohol. Marijuana is as ubiquitous in consumption as alcohol, but far easier to produce. It’s called weed for a reason and grows with ease whereas alcohol requires agricultural harvesting, processing and distillation; far easier to import alcohol than make it, hence the difference between moonshiners and bootleggers.

Marijuana requires nothing more than seed and a place to grow it.  Drug trafficking is for cartels that are into much more potent and expensive products like cocaine, heroin, etc. Marijuana grows everywhere, so who needs a cartel? Therein lies one of the problems states have found with the presumption of new found revenues in controlling the cannabis market; who needs to pay the added costs for a controlled market when the distribution is already so organically established and extensive?

We do have the need for legalization to end the incarceration of so many young people, especially minorities. The question now becomes what if they are found involved in bootleg pot? I can’t help thinking about what happened to Eric Garner in 2014 for bootleg cigarettes.  Imagine the barbarity of murdering that man over such a thing, but this bill creates the same environment.

Besides, don’t think for a minute that the motivation for this legislation was related to such considerations.  This was a power grab plain and simple, a revenue stream that was too much for Albany to ignore, but they are in for the same lessons in economics as the other states that passed similar legislation.  If it simply stopped with decriminalization, that would have been true progress, but obviously that’s not the case; what it does is it transfers the problem and costs of enforcing the prohibition of a product, to controlling its market in order to squeeze out revenues. The costs of the resources to continue with the drug war remains, but now we have the added costs for the New York State Office of Cannabis Management, and all that goes with it.

Consider some of the many requirements for being licensed, such as unionized labor, minority prioritization, and other such “social justice” goals, all of which are typical political machinations to garner votes, the costs of which will find its way to the price of pot from licensed vendors, and to the revenues required for “control”.  So after you add up all the taxes, fees, unionized labor and bureaucratic infrastructure on top of the cost to grow and distribute cannabis, it’s easy to understand why so many states that have tried to do this have had a hard time at best competing with what is already in place through the spontaneous and organic market that has been developed, albeit underground, ever since the “Reefer Madness” days nearly a century ago. 

Bad enough that government thinks it has the right to control what people choose to do themselves, but to do so after they already have, and for quite a long time, is like looking to get on a train that’s been long gone. So don’t be fooled by legislation presented as progress as it’s just another scheme to make an already bloated bureaucracy even bigger; it’s all just blowing smoke up you now where.

Historians have time lined the Civil Rights Movement from 1954 to 1968. That may seem arbitrary given the continuous calls for racial equality from many groups, politicians and activists to the present day. The era of the 50’s and 60’s, provides a perspective of the many conflicting elements within it.  You Have Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., Louis Farrakhan and many others, each with their own message regarding the state of racism in America. In this era of BLM and other ideologies of social justice, it gets confusing as to what if any progress has been made since then regarding what racism is.

Recently I listened to an April 2018 rerun of a debate on MSNBC between Toure Neblett and Kmele Foster about Colin Kaepernick taking a knee during an NFL game to protest the oppression of blacks in the criminal justice system.  What was telling in this debate was the way Toure treated Kmele, who obviously was not really all that focused on the NFL as much as the issue of criminal justice and racism.  Kmele was advocating rising above the black versus white narrative to focus more on the essence of the issue. Toure was emoting politically, and in effect, racially. If you have a moment, see the YouTube clip.

Kmele was providing statistics to show that the issue is with the criminal justice system itself and that the abuses were just as, and in some cases, even more so effecting white people. These statistics are not new but readily available by the FBI that accumulates and publishes criminal data from all over the US. Toure would have no part of that, facts were irrelevant in his view and Kmele was guilty of perpetrating a statistical hoax ignoring the oppression of blacks by the system.

In the more recent news the US has finally condemned the Chinese genocide against the Uighurs of Western China.  The dominant ethnic group in China is the Han; the Uighurs is a minority that is ethnically, culturally and religiously distinct from the Han. There within the most populous country in the world we have radical and institutional racism, proof that this horrible condition that has plagued humanity since primitive times is still with us.

In Africa, the tribal warfare in so many countries has resulted in repeated genocides reminding us that racism is not limited to color, but can occur within races based on the most ridiculous trivia differentiating the antagonists. In Europe the racism against Jews has been a dominant societal problem for millennia, culminating in the Holocaust, yet both the perpetrators and the victims were Caucasian.

The point is that racism has no color, neither for the perpetrator or the victim; it is a sickness born of the most crudely primitive form of collectivism that race is a fundamental determinant to distinguish one another as inferior or superior. It is therefore racist to ascribe racism as an inherent trait of anyone race, if not self-defeating to assume that only one race can be a victim of racism.

The moment race becomes a determinant in the judgement about another person, or group of people, you have racism; it simply is not more complicated than that.  The problem arises when that simple understanding is lost, especially with all the nonsense perpetrated about how anyone is inherently guilty of racism simply by being born in any particular racial category; this is similar to the lowest and most immoral idea of a form of original sin, but without any means of redemption.

It took one of the bloodiest civil wars of mankind to end slavery in America, and a long tortured history of repressed liberty for African Americans and other minorities to win their civil rights that we are all entitled to. So to now have a cultural divide where those achievements are ignored, forgotten or marginalized is a regression, a sign that the essential issue of equality before the law is being replaced by inequality by the law. Currently this idea is more covert under the guise of the current virtue signaling called social justice. Back in the days of the Civil Rights Movement it was much more overt with the likes of Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam, fundamentally motivated by an anti-white theology. The best summation of what social justice is was given by Hayek when he said “The idea of social justice is that the state should treat different people unequally in order to make them equal.”

Diametrically the opposite of such racism was Martin Luther King Jr., rightfully considered the greatest of the civil rights leaders.  His message was not about racism but the opposite, one of true equality under the law, benevolence to all people, against violence and coercion, but also one of courage and love.  This message was so beautifully expressed in his most famous speech from the 1963 March on Washington when he said “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

So I thought about all this recently while I was waiting on line for two hours on a cold night outside a church on Long Island waiting for our first COVID19 vaccine shot; I had plenty of time to think about a lot of things that night, but what got me thinking about all this was the application for the shot we had to fill out on a website earlier that day when we heard that our age group now qualified for the vaccine and that unexpectedly some pop-up sites were commissioned. When I saw the application I was stunned to see there where so many questions of racial profiling, but thankfully there was an option to not answer such questions. We completed the form and submitted it, hoping that our refusal to answer the racial profiling would not work against us. Anxiously my wife called numerous times to check on status and just in time we were told to get to the church right away as we got one of the last few appointments available.

Later on as we drove home, I said to my wife that while I had heard some news about a few politicians talking to the idea of prioritizing vaccine availability racially, I had not given it much thought.  I truly believed that our governments would never condone such a vile policy, one so inimical to the concept of equality, but apparently that was foolish of me. A few days later the news reported that Governor Cuomo had directed that the next vaccine shipments be doled out to churches whose congregational leaders would determine who gets them.

So what happened to the CDC prioritization protocols for first attending to medical staff, first responders, and the aged, especially those in nursing homes, and those with underlying medical conditions? These seemed like sensible guidelines giving what was known about this virus being particularly lethal for the aged and sick, and having those that attended to them immunized first. After all, haven’t we all heard that we need to rely on science and common sense and practice hygienically proven deterrents against spreading the disease? We also heard repeated ad infinitum and maybe ad museum that “We are all in this together!”  Well depressingly, maybe not quite all of us after all.

More and more this idea of prioritizing vaccine availability racially is gaining traction.  Today the news tells about discussions in the new administrations considering such policies.  I thought we were in for an era of ending divisiveness and working on unity, so how then does such an idea even get air time? I also read an article today about the State of Oregon convening a special committee to come up with proposals for implementing such a policy.

Even more yet as Congress debates about funds for helping small businesses recover post pandemic are likely to be tied up with legal problems arising from proposed language to prioritize such funds racially; apparently there is this little nagging problem with that called the Constitution which presents, hopefully, big legal hurdles for such ideas.

It is hardly sufficient to provide the ever present virtue signaling called social justice as a reason for such racism.  We recently celebrated a national holiday in honor of Martin Luther King Jr., and on that day my six year old granddaughter came to me to tell me all about his famous speech and proudly recited the quote noted above perfectly.  I wonder what lessons schools will be teaching about equality as she gets older.  I hope she never forgets that quote.

We just recently had the inauguration of a new president, one who has promised that the divisiveness and polarization of the past will not be the way of the future with his administration.  We are not getting off to a very good start. He has declared that his choices for cabinet and other top posts are being made on the basis on the candidate’s race, sex or other metrics that signal inclusiveness.  I have not heard that merit is one of the metrics considered; perhaps I missed that.

“I was educated once; it took me years to get over it.” Mark Twain

Back in 1970 Ayn Rand wrote an article that I kept with me for all these years.  In fact it was that article that convinced us to send our children to Montessori nursery schools, and we can thank her for having that influence on our lives, benefitting our children enormously.

The article was published in “The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution”. It was entitled “The Comprachicos”, which was a borrowed term from Victor Hugo’s novel “The Man Who Laughs”. The background to it is very disturbing, recounting the “child buyers” (literal translation) of the 16C to 18C who bought children for the purpose of disfiguring them for the amusement of royalty in the carnival shows of freaks in European courts.

The analogy was to “Progressive” educational methods that do the same to a child’s intellectual and psychological development. The article goes on in a very scholarly and informative manner about child development, and well worth reading for anyone concerned about early child development and education, especially new parents.

It is extremely relevant to today; when you read it, be aware that the terminology may seem current, but this article was written in 1970. While I have enjoyed Ayn Rand’s novels, I find her articles far more informative and inspiring, and this one is really top shelf. I love children more than anything (except my wife of course – just in case she actually reads my blog!); they possess that wondrous spirit of the magical question “why”, as everything is about finding answers because they know nothing, but want to know everything; no filters please, no dogma, no agenda, just existence. What a beautiful human spirit to possess!

Unfortunately that precious human quality of early development is the least appreciated in modern public educational systems. In our schools today, children are not to be educated, but indoctrinated. This move toward political agenda’s is manifested so perversely in the curriculum recently adopted by California for K-12 kids that would teach them such things like capitalism is bad because it is an economic system that provided advantages for Jewish and Irish immigrants at the expense of Native Americans, and other such racial nonsense.

It ignores of course the fact that the reasons for the main Irish immigration, representing half of all immigration from 1840 to 1860, was due to religious persecution, political oppression, and near starvation. For Jews, the major immigration was late 19C and early 20C, the primary cause being religious persecution with horrible pogroms in Eastern Europe, and in post WWII as refugees from the Holocaust and war torn Europe, and some later in 1970-80 due to similar issues in the USSR. That these immigrations were caused by the prospects of the advantages of capitalism is such a twisted racial thesis that should be dismissed as a disgusting product of truly twisted minds.

This new California curriculum has as a core mandate what is referred to as the “Four I’s of Oppression”, i.e. ideological, institutional, interpersonal and internalized. Its stated goal is to “…build new possibilities for post-imperial life that promotes collective narratives of transformative resistance.” What does that even mean? Such an obvious politicized agenda adopted at the expense of vital early child development is perverse to a benevolent and productive educational experience parents should expect in order that their children are provided the necessary tools to succeed in life. Sorry Mark Twain, but this kind of flagrant indoctrination of children may very well be too much for them to get over. Not only will it deprive them of a sound education, it will mentally debilitate their common sense and ability to reason through the many issues that will arise in their lives.

Aristotle tells us that the purpose of education is to develop reasoning. The new California curriculum is loaded with terms so apparently contrived as to be inexplicable, but obviously intent on blatant indoctrination, sentencing children to an even worse educational experience than California provided previously. Take for instance the fact that the average fourth grader’s reading level is below first grade. Current educational philosophy is to find emotionally safe places free from the curse of logic, an instrument of oppression. Which philosophy would you want the people educating your children to embrace? Common sense tells us why we are where we are, but it takes fear to prevent us from doing something about it, fear that to object will expose us to the thought police and make us a target for ridicule as oppressors, racists, fascists, or whatever verbal weapon of identity politics is the flavor of the month, and eventually we would be “canceled”. 

Consider this one passage of Rand’s article that really informs us of the insidious nature of educational thought like California’s new curriculum: “But the modern heirs of the comprachicos are smarter and subtler than their predecessors: they do not hide, they practice their trade in the open; they do not buy children, the children are delivered to them; they do not use sulphur or iron, they achieve their goal without ever laying a finger on their little victims.”

Remember again that this article was written fifty years ago, but how prescient and applicable to our current dilemma. California’s new curriculum is more obviously twisted that earlier versions with similar intent, but they too had similar results than what the new will undoubtedly produce. Consider as an example a well-known public figure in Congress, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. When questioned about how, given the egregious level of debt the US faces, she intends to fund the many social programs she advocates, she proposes the printing press as an unlimited source of wealth. While it only takes common sense and a modicum of historical awareness of where that would lead us, this product of a Boston College education lacks the common sense to understand you can’t spend from an empty pocket. By the way, she received a degree in economics, at a cost of $75K/year; this does not speak well of Boston College’s educational ability to develop reasoning in their students.

We find ourselves in such a state of affairs that our governments expect us to accept tribal collectivism rather than developing reasoning and a sense of self awareness in our children. This is a cruelty so perverse as to subject children to indoctrination rather than education. It is presented as a “progressive” agenda by a political class that oddly enough then complains that they are unable to understand why more and more citizens are opting out of public education in favor of private or home schooling, demonizing them as ignorant or narrow minded. It is their miseducation that creates such an elitist world view, denying any support for such options like vouchers and charter schools; you can always count on compulsion as their ultimate resort.

Their behavior reminds me of George Orwell’s adage about such people: “Some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals believe them.”

“Simply put, unsustainable debt is helping to keep too many poor countries and poor people in poverty.” Bill Clinton

It is remarkable that Bill Clinton, who was feared to be just another tax and spend Democrat, was the last president to lead Congress to enact legislation that not only reduced our debt and balanced the budget, but produced a surplus. When he came to office, few thought he would embrace Reagan’s economic policies, which even Clinton’s immediate predecessor, George H. W. Bush, failed to do. Reagan was not even as successful as Clinton in addressing what was at the time considered to be unsustainable debt and the most pressing existential crisis.

Through tax and welfare reform, free trade policies and deregulation, fiscal and foreign policy restraint, from 1998 to 2001 Clinton’s administrations produced a balanced budget, surpluses and reduction in debt, and not surprisingly, sustained economic growth, increased employment and reduced poverty. The unfortunate but ridiculous episode of his sexual misconduct and impeachment is more representative of political pettiness and tabloid sensationalism than anything else. I do not say this out of partisan loyalty as I’m neither a Democrat nor a Republican, just an objective observer of lessons we should learn from history.

Further, considering the fact that Clinton was faced with a Republican controlled congress, the fact that he was able to accomplish these things is also testimony to his trade craft in avoiding gridlock. That has not happened since then, and the lessons learned were all but forgotten as we can see by the various crises that have occurred since.

Since then we have engaged in never ending wars with one ill-conceived military intervention after another, bloated entitlements, regulation of just about every facet of the economy, created the worst fiscal crisis since the Great Depression, instituted trade wars with tariffs and sanctions, shuttered our economy and increased debt to the worst level of any nation in the history of the world; not exactly a great legacy to leave our future generations who will inherit the sins of their predecessors for many years to come.

The Federal budget deficit for 2019 was nearly a trillion dollars; for 2020 it will be more than three trillion dollars. We can point fingers all we want about things like the pandemic, tax cuts, bloated entitlements, etc. but we elected Trump who spends like a drunken sailor, and we then we elected Biden who promises to spend even more. We did that, not some Russian hackers or a viral disease, we get to empower those that do these things to us; we have met the enemy and it’s ourselves. 

I say that because I suspect the answer to this question is an emphatic no – would the American people elect a politician today who promised to do the kind of things that Reagan and Clinton did?  Would we elect a president who would cut entitlements, pull our troops out of foreign countries, propose a Federal Reserve leader who would reduce its balance sheet, or even better, dismantle that tool of monetary corruption altogether, abolish fiat currency, push for legislation, or even better a constitutional amendment, for a balanced budget and fiscal restraint? Think about that and ask yourselves if Americans today are willing to accept what it takes to get off the addiction of debt.

Clinton knew that debt is the worst poverty and that you can’t spend your way out of a recession or borrow your way out of debt. He rose above partisan politics to do the right thing.  True there were also things he did that caused the housing bubble that some economists say was one of the main contributors to the 2008 Financial Crisis, but the way that crisis was addressed only made things worse; Quantitative Easing is just stealth financial engineering to spend our way out of a recession and borrow our way out of debt, a policy that saw the slowest recovery since the Great Depression; inexplicably, we are still doing it.

Due to the ever expanding money supply with the freakish creation of fiat currency, and the expanding issuance of US Treasuries, much of it held by foreign governments who are not exactly friends of America, the US debt is now approaching thirty trillion dollars. So when you hear that the Federal Reserve intends to keep interest rates repressed for years to come at less than one percent, think about who is really the beneficiary of such accommodation? 

It obviously benefits those in debt, and none more so than the US Government. It also provides the private sector easier access to the credit market by facilitating loans, which in effect increases debt for business and consumers. This is how the financial virus of debt spreads through the economy until we reach a crisis as in 2008 with massive defaults causing credit markets to shut down.  Consider what the government’s solution to that crisis was with Quantitative Easing and other accommodations to actually provide even more liquidity for even more credit availability. In effect, their solution was to do more of what actually got us in to trouble to begin with.

While you also hear that inflation is low, even if you believe the big lie that it’s only two percent, do the math and you know that when the Fed says it will not consider negative interest rates, we are already there. Now consider all those retirees on fixed income from pensions and savings and you have a glimmer of how destructive such manipulations are.

So how is it that we now find ourselves in even a worse situation than what Reagan and Clinton faced, but solved and not that long ago? There was a time when Americans made fun of countries we called Third World and Banana Republics; today we can look in the mirror and ask if we have the hubris to say such things anymore. We have become a caricature of what we used to disdain, yet we are apathetic to the problem and unlike Reagan and Clinton, cowardly avoid the solution; kicking the can down the road will only work for a while and only as long as there is road, but what happens when you run out of road?

Where are the leaders who will get us off the debt addiction and on the path to recovery? No one appears on the near horizon; while Democrats rightfully blame Republicans for their wretched fiscal stewardship of our treasury, they come to power with a platform to do even worse. How is it lately that our political system comes up with a government whose solutions are to expand the problem? Is it the system, or the culture of its participants? I believe it has become more of the later and that presents even a greater problem we need to solve.

So the next time you hear a politician proposing anything that creates debt, remember Emerson’s advice that “A man in debt is so far a slave.” Well what then would you call a nation in debt?