This is what tyranny looks like

Photo Credit: LA Times Blog 15 SEP 2012

 

Picture of Nakoula Basseley Nakoula taken in for questioning by police.  In the middle of the night.

His crime?

Creating bad art that was used as an excuse by some rioters in Egypt.

Via AFP (h/t Weaselzippers):

AL-Qaeda said the deadly attack on the US consulate in Benghazi, Libya was in revenge for the killing of the network’s number two Sheikh Abu Yahya al-Libi, SITE Intelligence Group reported.

“The killing of Sheikh Abu Yahya only increased the enthusiasm and determination of the sons of (Libyan independence hero) Omar al-Mokhtar to take revenge upon those who attack our Prophet,” said al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula said in a statement, quoted by the US-based monitoring group.

Thus those who murdered the US Ambassador to Libya did so with intent to kill from the outset.  It was meant as a punishment to the US and is thus not an act of murder but an act of war.  As the Libyan government has decried (Source: Independent, UK) such action and no government wishes to take credit, it is an act of war by a Private group against the US.  This is not murder because the US Ambassador was gay, because he was 'asking for it' or due to any other reason than being the US Ambassador to Libya.  The State Dept. had warning 48 hours in advance of the assassination that there would be mobs outside the Embassies and Consulate in Cairo and Benghazi (Source: Independent, UK) and according to sources in Libya (Source: Israelnationalnews.com), although the spokesman for the DNI denies this (Source: Politico).

Responsibility for protection of the Ambassador and all other State Dept. personnel overseas falls to the State Dept. (Source: Breitbart).  Do note that the State Dept. has security of all of its Embassies, other Consulates and missions under its authority for security.

A report from UPI on 11 SEP 2012 indicates otherwise:

CAIRO, Sept. 11 (UPI) -- A radical group plans to launch terrorist attacks against the Israeli and U.S. embassies in Cairo, the Egyptian Intelligence Service is warning.

A top secret letter obtained by the news organization al-Masry al-Youm states that elements from the group Global Jihad have been planning attacks on the two embassies.

The letter addressed to a top Egyptian security official was forwarded to all security sectors across Egypt, al-Masry al-Youm reported Tuesday.

There was no word on when the attacks were supposed to take place.

Global Jihad has been accused by Israel of perpetrating the August 5th attack against Egyptian border guards in Sinai that left 16 dead.

Thus there was warning and as the reports were just getting to the press on 11 SEP 2012, they had to work through official releases and checking in the bureaucracy for days ahead of time.  Indeed  Sharon Rondeau at The Post & Email credits the original date of the warning letter to 04 SEP 2012.

From the Glenn Reynolds posting on this we learn:

• That is a scarf wrapped around his head, not a towel.
  
• Probations are handled by officers of the court and law enforcement is not called in unless a suspected crime has been committed.  Probation violation can be due to multiple things that have no criminality attached to them, and if Mr. Nakoula was suspected of that while using his computer, then his computer can be seized and he can talk with his Probation Officer.

Mr. Nakoula has every right to make a blasphemous film as a citizen of the United States.

Mr. Nakoula has every right to make bad art as a citizen of the United States.

Mr. Nakoula has every right to express himself and not have literal knock on his door at midnight from the police asking him in for questioning and then taking him out through a gaggle of reporters.  There are a number of people who have called for the death of Mr. Nakoula in the Middle East and some of those are attached to the organizers of riots in the region.  These people are working with the most radical and barbaric terrorists in the world who think nothing of suicide bombing using children and the disabled, who feel no regret at chopping off heads of their opponents, and who incite to murder and chaos on a global scale.

The film of Mr. Nakoula had been on youtube for quite some time before these events, and the citation of it by those who have done the rioting and assassination is nothing more than pretext, excuse and yet another finger to point at the West not because we are inciting them but because they hate our liberties and freedom.  Like the freedom to speak one's mind about religion and to even criticize other religions and not be taken in and tried on blasphemy charges for such criticism.  The 'questioning' of Mr. Nakoula is done as a cover for the real reason: that he is inconvenient to the regime of current Administration and a handy scapegoat, a mere Goldstein to excuse tyrannical action.

First they came for the bad film makers and I said nothing as I did not make bad films...

Screw THAT.

I do protest.

Because I know that at the end of the long list, I will be included in that ever expanding enemy's list, just as normal people have been every time that the list of handy scapegoats had to be increased to excuse incompetence, lack of oversight or just plain old horror by those seeking tyranny.  This is about the freedom of each of us to say as we feel we must say to inform our fellow citizens, and if it is done with bad art then SO BE IT.  Censorship in the face of terrorism is appeasement and walking away from support of human rights AT HOME.  This must stop NOW or the result is a horror beyond imagining and rivers of blood under your feet and mine for not speaking out TODAY.

I do speak out as that is my job as a Citizen of the Republic of the United States of America.

Mine eyes have seen the glory...

Yes, yet another bit of commentary by me at Hot Air (on the Ted Cruz victory) that I'm recycling into a post.  More thoughts on this at some future time, but that will be more a summation of past posts and outlooks.  This is just a short, sweetened condensed version.  Anyone having read my works over the years will know exactly where I'm coming from and all standard non-fixing of spelling, syntax, etc. is in place:

Do note that Ted Cruz didn’t win because of MONEY.

He won because of commitment from individuals to support his campaign and to mail envelopes, place phone calls, and talk up his campaign with friends, co-workers and other like minded people. The stars of the Senate, Sarah Palin and the rest of the ‘leaders’ are only ‘leaders’ in the sense that the abolitionist movement had ‘leaders’: the movement set the tone, tenor and direction and a few were able to voice it better and help spur it on, but they in no way led the movement, itself.

This is the horrifying part to the two parties and the elite establishment. What the Tea Parties have done is coalesce, create leaderless organizations that are distributed, grass-roots and committed in a way that saves the most time to get the most results for the input given. Outspending a candidate isn’t going to change commitment for those who have had to go through the gauntlet of fire by the MFM and the simpatico elite establishment. You may not get a political ‘leader’ on the other side of that, but you do get an individual and a movement that is purified by fire in the crucible. Bring on more fire, pour it on, and the movement gets stronger as it winnows out the extras, those things that don’t fit and begins to concentrate on the pure beliefs of those involved. Then you reach out to those elements that remain unpurified, incorporate them and welcome THEM to the crucible. Not all will be allies, not all will be able to take the heat but the best from them will step forth to join with the larger movement.

In 2009 Statehouses started to change hands and not just into Republican hands but to those following the Tea Party – the beliefs of those elected were getting scrutiny and a number will be melted out by the fire.

By 2010 Scott Brown was a shot across the bow, followed up by many salvos against the elite establishment. This was not about winning elections, but to start the purification process on the elite politicians in the Republican party to start melting their power base away from the inside. You couldn’t win all those races, but you could win enough to prove the point and to establish the marker of the future.

In 2011 more Statehouses started to shift, and this was not just to Republicans but to an organized grass-roots that sought no leaders and, instead, welcomed spokesmen. By joining with other organizations and finding out what fit from them since the self-organization began, these other organizations found out that some of what is good from them gets incorporated into the larger movement, but that the movement is independent of them.

That gets you 2012 where a coalescing can get behind Ted Cruz and others, while Senators and Club for Growth now find itself against a FreedomWorks candidate in a run-off… spokesmen and ‘leaders’ are not blindly followed, and good citizens willing to risk the fire of derision and hatred spewed at them for their positions on smaller government and greater personal liberty get backed.

This is the horror to the elite establishment in both parties and the Left as a whole: the more they attack the more people come to understand those that they oppose and find them to be friends and neighbors with common-sense attitudes and simple involvement and understanding in politics that the complex fails on high, and the simple succeeds on low. Now Freedom Works reaches out to other Nations, Japan, Australia, Serbia, Israel, Italy, Greece, even into China to support those who see the rights of man as individual and personal liberty and freedom as the greatest force for good for all mankind. We will not always agree with our friends in other Nations and the venues they must choose for themselves: but we can reach out to support them in what they do.

This works.

Tyrants of the world, behold! The word of freedom and liberty with self-governance is now being whispered in the darkest corners of tyranny. And this time we vow never, ever, to forget these lessons and why freedom and liberty are the basis for the common good amongst men. The Tea Party was just the first ray of light on the horizon… soon the vast number of rays shall show the source of them and the powerful will tremble in fear.

ajacksonian on August 2, 2012 at 7:22 AM

Yes, there is something larger than just Ted Cruz, the Tea Parties and the other list of usual suspects trotted out by the MFM going on.  The establishment that they wished to yoke mankind to is falling apart because it just doesn't work.  Something that does work is already in place with each and every individual on the planet who comes to realize that they are the greatest moral actors on Earth because they are here, now, to exercise their free will to the betterment of themselves and their fellow man.

Tyrants shall tremble.

Dictators shall fall.

And the dross of tyranny will once again meet freedom and liberty unleashed not just in America, but everywhere as we uphold the promise and understanding of our Founders.  All men are, indeed, created equal and are endowed by their creator with certain, inalienable, rights – that amongst those are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness which we call Fortune.

This is the job handed to you, to me, and to each and every person on the planet.

Natural and Unnatural law

The following was originally posted at The Jacksonian Party.

Between the Moral Law of God and the Civil Law of Man that is guided by Moral Law there is the other realm of law, which is Natural Law.  This thing known as Natural Law are the boundaries that Nature places upon us, and in this I do not speak of the philosophical 'nature' (that is what are the characteristics of a thing or person) but the Universal Nature, which is the physical realm of the universe.  This physical realm has two aspects to it: chaos and order. 

Chaos is represented by the randomness of nature from the lowest levels, upwards.  Brownian motion is bounded but chaotic in that it can have limitations upon it (based on volume, media type and temperature) but that what results in the way of motion is unpredictable at any given moment.  Chaos creates randomness in events so that there is a factor of indeterminacy involved.  This fact is part of Quantum Mechanics and comes from examining how Nature works.

Order is the sudden appearance of direction or higher order stability that resists chaos.  The association of atoms in the form of molecules then has a larger scale set of predictable factors to them in the form of physical properties and structure.  The capability for an underlying chaotic system to have structure appear is described by the concept known as emergence.  When a number of unrelated factors then fall together into a new and unpredictable form of orderly behavior, then you have an emergent behavior that is unpredictable based on its component parts.  All of this plays out in a framework within space and time, and these parts of the framework give rise to the effects we see.  Part of that framework is chaos at the lowest most level and, from that, the framework will have chaotic things happen within it.  Everything must cope abide by that at all other levels that coincide and derive from it.

Nature is, from that, chaotic and emergent to forms of order.

From this order is not the same as law, which makes law a separate realm from chaos, emergent behavior and order.

In Moral Law there is the requirement to acknowledge that we get it from something outside of ourselves and is a requirement for the Order of Man.  Can Moral Law be described as an emergent phenomena?  This would require answering the question: what is the source of the emergent phenomena?  In the Universal sense this is God, that thing that all can know and yet none can fully define.  Moral Law, recorded in scripture, also appears (in part) in other cultures as well that do not have scriptural basis for their Moral Law.  What parts of this are Universal to Man?  And why ask that question at all?

The reason for asking the question is that Man is a rational being (that is able to discern cause and effect, remember them and think about them dispassionately) and seeks to find those patterns that exist across different areas of knowledge to see if they are related.  A positive relationship (that is an equivalence of pattern) then points to underlying structure with possible variations that can be examined as to their true universality.  A truly Universal conclusion is true across all domains that are encompassed by the hypothesis, while a localized one is that which is true only for a locality.  Thus for those things that Man finds across cultures that are equivalent, there can be some examination as to what the source of those qualities are.

The most Universal quality of man is this thing we do known as 'marriage' or the bonding of man and woman to create a family via intimate relationships.  Marriage is seen across all cultures in some formulation and across all eras of mankind that we have records for.  From that we can put the hypothesis down that marriage is a Universal quality for those beings that are capable of recognizing the need for such a bond and being able to assent to it in a voluntary fashion.  Traditions of 'arranged marriages' through matchmakers or other venues is a cultural phenomena on top of the underlying structure of marriage and is created to turn a voluntary and yet wholly necessary need into a stable system of society that is involuntary.  Those systems, then, are phenomena based on the underlying premise, not the underlying premise itself as, absent those social structures, the quality of Man to seek marriage would still exist.

To marry is to form a social unit called the family.  Doing this then has other requirements with it to safeguard the family.  The first of those is self-sacrifice on the part of parents for their children so that the children may survive to continue the lineage and social order of that family.  This is not just a mother or father dying to save a child, but goes much deeper into us as individuals to address our negative natural liberties and rights.  There is no such thing as a purely positive liberty or right: all liberties and rights are of two parts via Nature so that they are not biased and have no direction to them.  By having natural liberty and rights in equal parts (though not, of necessity, equal amounts) chaos is guaranteed expression via both venues.  To gain order from these natural rights and liberties requires an assertion of willpower over them when they are exercised.  Thus to put aside negative natural liberty of, say, offensive warfare without cause then requires an expression of will on a continual basis by individuals to not use this negative right to exercise this negative liberty to put the family in danger.

Because this is of primary importance as warfare is lethal, it must be agreed upon by all family members and that agreement made specific and stated for all involved.  From this we get this thing called Civil Law within the context of Law of Nations.  Civil Law is nothing more than the assertion of will over our negative liberties in a way agreed upon by our fellow man so as to not exercise the natural rights associated with them and this adhered to by all with consequences for not following those agreements.  The result of such Civil Law is emergent order from the society that is created by these agreements.  Because such agreements need to be remembered in their specifics an organ of society known as government is created to be the holder of these agreements about our negative natural liberties.  Although there is a Moral Law of 'Thou shall not kill', which is part of a formulation of creation of Civil Law, this is understood to be in the realm of Moral expression in the Civil arena.  There is no 'Thou shall not go to war on your lonesome' edict and, indeed, there are individuals that find themselves doing just that without moral or civil justification for their acts.  Such individuals have decided not to follow Civil Law under Law of Nations and reclaim their full natural liberty and rights for themselves and are now in opposition to those who follow Civil Law which is part of this thing known as Civilization.  This is a reversion to base savagery against civilization, a return to natural man who is full of chaos and unwilling to assert will to get a social order.

Law is the creation of order via the assertion of will and the restraint of use of negative natural rights and liberties.  This is true of Law of Nations, that law created by marriage, and for Civil Law, that law that comes from the creation of society for protection amongst families and for family members within the family unit.  Moral Law is a bias or direction to Natural Law which itself is without bias and equal in treatment to all within it.  Man cannot make Natural Law because we live within Nature and are natural beings.  Man can find or have revealed Moral Law as it is that which is outside the realm of Nature, outside the realm of thought and wholly within the realm of the Eternal but can be expressed within the Natural realm.

From these things we find the following Laws:

1) Moral Law can be discovered via revelation or via chance (such as social groups finding that the punishing of those killing within that social group requires a cost to that action to deter it).  As such the foundations for a moral outlook are Universally available, although the pathway to that understanding can be indirect as well as direct.  If you do not have revelation, then you have trial and error using rational observation to see what the results are for certain action and re-action pairings.

2) Natural Law acts upon all things in Nature and is universal within the realm of Nature.  Being within this domain of law means we do not set it, do not create it, and it exists wholly outside of our sphere of influence,  Nature provides us with our bodies, our lives, and the physical world which we can manipulate.  Nature is uncaring, neutral, and provides much in the way of the physical domain that we don't understand and may never be able to understand.

3) Law of Nations is the unwritten law that Man discovers via the application of Moral Law to oneself for the creation of family.  Law of Nations is universal to all thinking beings who have access to Moral Law, which is to say all rational beings that procreate and create families via a bond of marriage or other, similar, dedication.  This exists not just within the confines of Natural Law but as a concept separate from Natural Law, making Law of Nations Universal to all rational beings.

4) Civil Law is created by society which, itself, is made under Law of Nations, and is the expression of Moral Law within Law of Nations by a society which wishes to create a State for safeguarding the population against those who would express their negative natural rights and liberties against their fellow man.  Moral Law gives founding to direction and bias on those Natural liberties and rights that we have, and when we create a family we find that Moral Law almost immediately from being Natural Beings who must protect our offspring from Nature's creatures that do not so well discriminate their negative liberties and rights than do we.

When man has no ability to write, indeed has no alphabet but does have a spoken language or other means of communication, items from the realms of unwritten law become an integral part of the communication's tradition so that it may be passed on and preserved.  Moral Law can be revealed and passed down by word of mouth, Natural Law is always present to present questions and get results and those results are reflective of Nature, Law of Nations to protect family and create the Nation is universal upon first creating family and its form becomes apparent because of that.  Civil Law is the last law that is derived from the other laws and it, too, can exist in an unwritten form as a set of customs or practices that those within a given society live by.

There are interesting aspects of Moral Law in this arrangement, in that it is not (of necessity) written down but can be discovered by Man who utilizes both emotions and reason, together, to find answers to problems that arise in society.  Law of Nations is that which is about structure, duty, and ordering of power by society due to it being a society and interacting with other societies that hold different customs.  Before revelation man utilized chance, which is to say trying things differently until finding something that worked, to deal with problems created between men within society.  Law of Nations can only speak of this as a manifestation within society that is stable, it cannot say what Moral Law is but that it is a formulary necessary for Law of Nations to happen fully. 

By staying one's hand within a family, by not killing each other, by not stealing from each other, indeed, by not inflicting lasting harm upon the family the expression of Moral Law becomes visible: it is that which guides us on how to create a stable family and society.  This requires both reason (as understanding that harming a family member will rebound negatively on oneself) and emotion (to understand that forgiveness for the faults of family members is necessary to have a family, but that forgiving only comes with the atonement by that individual that did wrong by the family).  That same staying and continued withholding of it creates the family, as well.  When spouses are abusive to their mate, their children or themselves, there is a fundamental violation of Moral Law, and as it is destructive to Law of Nations it is a negative factor for having Nations and even civil society.  That is why we have Civil Law so as to penalize such activities and safeguard families from abusive parents: it is to transmit that the family order has a reason behind it, a rationale, that it is positive when upheld and negative to not just the family but the Nation when it is neglected or abused.  To not punish these actions by actors is to invite the decay of society and the downfall of it and the Nation that is sustained by the family.  Penalties in this realm have been severe on the Civil Law side and for Natural Law the ability to protect oneself and one's family invokes the positive liberty and right of warfare: defensive war for survival and self-protection.

From all of this there are interesting questions that can be posed in the context of Universal Laws, but they are more of interest to philosophers or theologians than to those surviving a daily life.  That we can even formulate such questions is a testament to the power of these Laws and that our holding to them can create a long lasting society and the concept of Nation even when Nation States rise and fall many times in the same region. 

The actual ability to even ask those questions has required that there be tolerance for asking them, and that has been a high powered, long fought after battle that has spanned nearly all of human history, was first given any written establishment for Nations in 1648, and is still NOT recognized by large swaths of mankind and is being actively fought against within those areas that have it.  Yet religious tolerance has become an instance of the highest order of civilization so long as a religion does not dictate to the State and only to the individual, and that society remains open to other religious beliefs that do not seek to impose themselves by negative natural rights and liberty.  That is an effect of how a fight for aspects of Moral Law that have the same basis has established a common space for those religions to exist in a secular realm.  The secular realm, itself, must be open to religious teachings of all religions that follow the same civil principles of respect and tolerance for believers of other faiths. 

To try and exclude Moral Law as garnered by religious faith from the secular space is destructive to that space as it undercuts its very existence: to find commonality across beliefs that can be upheld without imposition of any particular faith upon those who do not believe in it.  By holding commonalities to be common requires the robust and civil discussion of Moral Law within that secular space so that better Civil Laws can be found.  Do note that even atheists, agnostics or those who civilly practice relatively unusual religious rights are not the holder of this secular space, but participants in it.  Those who do not believe in religious basis for the underpinning of the secular space must recognize the origins of that space, their protection within it as a higher form of learning and that, in particular, if it is garnered via mere trial and error via faiths, then it is more precious than any single faith within that realm and therefore MUST be upheld as a neutral space for such civil discussions.

Secular space for government does not mean that such government does not recognize the foundation of the secular space or those things necessary to uphold it: indeed it was formed to protect those practices, not expunge them.

Secular space for society is a recognition and acceptance amongst all members of society as individuals that their practice of faith (or lack thereof) may not put the civil basis for society at risk without penalties and that their ability to practice a faith and even change faiths is upheld by having a neutral secular space that is common for all of society.  What you do with your life and within your household shall not undercut that common space that must be open to all arguments and that arguments on Moral Law must first be won by civil discourse, not by secular fiat or by gaming government practices.  Indeed when government becomes biased to exclude Moral Law and its teachings from the secular space, or to only allow a delimited set of discussions via civil means, it becomes destructive of the entire society that creates that secular space for religious freedom.  The worst of all tyrannies is government deciding which religion is and is not acceptable within the civil sphere and then using the power of government to enforce that.  When the State comes to mandate its presence upon the alter, you are then not far away from open warfare as this is a desecration of the advanced civilized understandings of tolerance for religious worship and practice within realm of civil society.

By utilizing the understandings of Laws Natural and those outside of Nature (although available within Nature) and then adding historical understanding of practice and conflict of many Nations, States and societies, the foundations of the framework for the modern world lay exposed and available to all willing to see them.  Even if you disagree with how they got there or deny the impetus to make them, the recognition of the self-evident presence of it must be admitted: argue about the source of the foundations as you will, we must accept that they exist, have instance and are there.

To not do so is to invite the decay and collapse of civilization as we know it and to seek savagery not only for oneself but for all of mankind.  No good will ever come of that.

Con Man Universe Description

A Confidence Man is an individual or group that runs a corrupt game or scheme so as to defraud those who pay into or invest in such a scheme.  I will horrendously oversimplify this, as the multiplicity and complexities involved in con games, as well as types of them, are enormous.  Still they all boil down to just a few major factors.  In the universe of the Con Man (and associates) there are only a few classes of people outside of those actually running the thing:

1) The Plant(s) - These are individuals who may know about the scheme or game, or may only be willing to accept minor payment to take part in the game or scheme so as to make it work.  Plants are the individuals who 'win' or get pay outs early on in the system.  These are the individuals that give a patina of legitimacy to the scheme or game so as to entice others to take part.  Plants can also be individuals who are of a later class, but so early on in the scheme or game that it 'works' for them.

2) Rubes - These are the individuals who buy into the game or scheme as 'legitimate' but have no knowledge that a game is going on.  Plants can be first generation Rubes who unknowingly play the game or pay into the scheme but are in that select segment that must get a payout, of some sort, so as to keep the mollified and have the illusion of an above-board operation remain.  Rubes who become Plants via this unknowing pay off of a fraudulent scheme or game in its first iteration also serve as recruiters to get more people to play the game or buy into the scheme.  The more gullible Rubes there are saying that the scheme or game is legitimate, the greater the long term pay off for those running the game or scheme.

3) The Mark - The Mark are the individuals in the high profit zone for the game or scheme.  Marks can be from any level of Rube-dom, but they are the ones who will buy into the scheme late enough so that they will not get their money back.  Marks may be unintentional players who just want to have some 'fun' or who have a predilection to believing the scheme works due to the number of Plants and Rubes.  When the game or scheme fails, these are the folks who lose the most.  Once a confidence scheme is fully operational after the first level of pay outs, anyone paying in can be said to be The Mark.  The Mark is the target of the swindle.

4) Those who see through the game or scheme for what it is.  These are the people that the game or scheme derides, calls them 'unsophisticated' or 'stupid' or otherwise castigates them.  That serves the two-fold purpose of assuring the Rubes and future Marks that they are the 'smart' ones who are going to 'make' money off of the scheme or game.  The level of attacks on those who see through the game may be intense enough to convince them to become Rubes, which also makes them qualified to be Marks.

 

Consider the world of Bernie Madoff with a scheme built up out of the 'intelligent' investing class of rich individuals.  He originally made his name as a smart trader on Wall Street, and with a good history of some ability to pick stocks he gained the reputation of knowing what he was talking about.  That portion of the patina to his con game ran through until just a few years ago, but the con, itself, started in the 1980's.  The con started with friends and family, and then became a 'word of mouth' affair that described the 'incredible deal' that Madoff had for those willing to invest in his organization.  The deal was that Madoff had a 'secure' group of stocks and bonds that were 'market proof': they gave a steady yield no matter what the market did.  His immediate friends and family became Plants and they created the aura of Madoff being able to 'out-smart' the market and even had pay offs to show for it.  Thus the investment scheme gained legitimacy as it was seen as being able to pay out as it said it could do.  For nearly two decades the population of Rubes expanded and so did the population of Marks.

The external population was kept at bay as they were not privy to the investment scheme system.  Part of making the aura of stability was that it went after rich individuals and conned them into believing that their money gave them good and smart advice via this system.  Madoff's system was recognized for what it was when a mathematician exposed the fraud in 2001, but by then the Universe of Rubes and Marks was large enough to convince Congress and Regulators that the scheme was legitimate.  Like any Ponzi Scheme it requires a new generation of individuals to pay into it, and lacked funds to actually pay out as there were very few actual investments in the scheme at all.  The numbers were made up.  As the latest recession started to tremble into the upper reaches of the markets, those individuals finding their investments evaporating went to Madoff to get their money back, as he said they could do.  He hoped to weather out the storm, thought it would be minor, and was able to pay off the first few people asking for funds as he hoped to retain the air of legitimacy via their becoming Plants.  As the numbers wanting their money back increased, the system could no longer pay out to them and the scheme was revealed for what it was.

 

Enron's mess of water and energy trading followed a similar set of lines in the buying, trading and selling of energy and water as commodities via the State run system in California.  Enron's attempt to hold financial pay outs steady, however, led to misreporting finances, that then steamrollered once the fraud was uncovered.  It went from controlling a majority of the private power sold in California to nothing in a period of months.  Here the scheme was the utilization of the ever increasing energy needs in California to purchase energy outside the State and put it through the State's regulatory system which was stifling the creation of new power facilities in the State.  In this case the Rubes set up the system to run the game, and the people of California were the Plants and then the Marks. 

Enron, by manipulating the power market, was able to create shortages and hike costs all the while showing a sound financial footing in the commodity trading scheme that it ran.  This scheme ran well enough, at an internal loss of course, that they expanded into the water markets and started doing the same thing.  When the crooked money transfers, kick-backs and executives siphoning funds from the company to leave it as a shell was revealed, the entire set of schemes imploded.  When the Plants became the Marks via the legitimacy given to the scheme via the Rubes in Sacramento, the ability to actually buy and sell power into California showed deficiencies in the accounting practices at Enron.  Whistleblowers would reveal the system, but the system itself can be seen as a creation of an over-weening State wanting to get around hard decisions and a confidence game stood up to gull the Rubes into believing that they could do so.  Rubes who set up a system to make hard decisions for them are less likely to run good oversight on the system as actually doing so gets them involved in distasteful decisions which they want to hand off in the first place.

 

Stepping up in scale is the Bank of NY penetration by the Red Mafia that started in the early 1990's with the collapse of the USSR.  In the post-USSR set of Republics there was a lack of hard currency as the Soviet Ruble was worthless.  Yet there were still factories, mines, and a population that could work if you could do the minimal and guarantee food for them.  Those able to get hard cash, or even work out barter systems between ore, finished goods and food gained control of the means of production as they became available.  Approximately one-third of that fell into criminal enterprises which were set up by an internal group of operatives assisted by the financier on the lamb, Marc Rich (the from previous articles on the Red Mafia, in particular this one on international finances).  Again the Rubes set up the system (the Russian government) for the Con Men to operate and once they were able to sell goods and ore for hard cash, they immediately went into procuring banks and over-seas accounts.  To get around foreign investment transaction oversight required penetrating western financial institutions, which was done via the Bank of NY (my lengthy article on that is here).  In short being able to get a couple of Plants into the BoNY system allowed for other operatives from the Red Mafia to utilize a money laundering system on a global scale that would process approximately $70 billion through it in less than ten years, and more like 7 years.  The fraud became apparent when one of the side operators (only a side operator in this area, but a major player in Russia) Semion Mogilevitch who was part of the YBM/Magnex fraud scheme that took place in the Canadian and US commodities market for permanent magnets.  That securities fraud funneled money through the BoNY and into a system of trade and transactions that still has not been teased out.

In this case the fraud system is so large, and the fronts operating with legitimacy via the legal framework in Russia and exploiting the nature of the capital and commodities markets in the west, that no one can even be sure if the fraudulent transactions have actually stopped.  When billions of dollars go into transactions for aluminum or steel, who will notice a few hundred million more in fraud bundled in with it?  In this case the Rubes in government have made everyone, globally, potential Marks.  The Plants are those individuals who actually had normal transactions go through the fraudulent system early on.  Even with the tightening of banking and financial regulations by many countries, many other countries refuse to do so as they are seen as 'safe havens' for 'troubled times' and enjoy having the benefits of large money transactions funding their governments via minor taxes.  So while a few Plants have been prosecuted, along with a Rube or two, the Marks remain defrauded.

 

Moving up scale from that.... and you can move upscale from that, size-wise, is another Ponzi Scheme that has been rolling blissfully along for nearly 80 years.  It has the patina and age of legitimacy.  There are lots of Plants who get pay offs from the system, and it has a full population of Rubes who, by law, are also The Marks.  This is another Rube created system by government unwilling to make hard decisions and wanting to pass on any oversight of a system that was not meant to work outside of very limited circumstances.  The scheme seems so 'nice' that Rubes don't want to admit to themselves that it doesn't work:  look at all the Plants getting pay offs!  Unfortunately as they are also The Mark there are a few people starting to realize that this system is broke (not just broken, but broke) and that paying into it will not sustain or recover it.  This system is the US Social Security Administration, and since its first pay outs in 1940 it has been creating a class of Plants to confirm that the system 'works'.

Based on the proposition that you 'invest' into an account with government, you are 'guaranteed' a set of payments equal to what you paid in plus 1% until you draw all 'your' money from the account.  Even when created private annuity systems paid out better via investments as those running annuities must keep reserve capital inside their funds system to allow for pay back of funds over time.  In good times the funds run on the excess made, stock a portion of earnings into the reserve and then utilize the rest to grow the system.  In bad times the limited payoffs cause the fund system to shrink, but retains operating expenses necessary to run pay outs from reserves to cover those who paid into the system.

The US government, on the other hand, spends the money it gets and puts a big, fat IOU in the reserve of SSA.  This became law during the Johnson Administration, and since then there are no 'reserves' of funds for SSA: it is broke and pays out in income from FICA and now from the general fund of the US government.

By definition any scheme that is able to pay out early adopters but only by growing the base of those paying in while keeping no reserves (or only a slim reserve like Madoff) is a Ponzi Scheme.

Thus SSA is a Ponzi Scheme.

Every single individual drawing 'their' promised money is involved in a wealth transfer system with the government as intermediator so that young, and relatively poor, working class individuals pay to have the older, and generally richer, generation 'retire' with a 'guaranteed income' from SSA.  Set up so that those who would get money from the system would be limited via a 'retirement age' of 63 which was also the average life expectancy when the system was started, it would never have had to pay out to more than half the older population and thus would 'work'.  Demographic trends in two directions make this unworkable: increased average life expectancy, and the child replacement rate.  I have examined this problem previously (in this article) but when this is taken in the context of a Confidence Game the perspective becomes clear - the retirement age is kept constant (even as life expectancy increases and child per family decreases) so as to create a 'faith' in the system that it 'works' and will be able to run like this forever.  Madoff would pay off some early investors entirely and that gave them faith in the system and they spread the word about it.  So, too, does SSA have a couple of layers of the Ponzi pyramid behind it giving the sense that this systems is 'workable' and 'legitimate'.  And as with any good con game, the Con Man has gained such a degree of confidence that, like Enron, even when presented with the cold, hard facts, people don't want to believe that this is the way it is actually run.

When this system comes down all of the Rubes will know they are the Mark, and some of the Plants will, also.

The system has been run, like the California energy trading system, to put off hard decisions and yet get pleasing results, to the point where the first internal audits of SSA in the 1980's put its collapse around 2050.  Then in the early 1990's it was 2030.  Around 2000 it was 2020.  SSA went into the red this year.  Every single politician since that original revelation during the Reagan Administration who has told you this system: 'works', is 'sustainable', is run 'efficiently', and is 'good' has been lying through their teeth to you or are oblivious to the ways of economics and demographics.  Yet as they take an Oath to the Constitution, and thusly to you, they have been negligent in their duties for decades.  Remember those trying to point out the problems in the system or try to 'fix' this already rigged system have been shouted down as being 'mean to the elderly', 'stupid', 'hurtful', and just plain 'ignorant'.  That has been the shouting down by the Con Men to continue the system by castigating those who recognize the con game for what it is.

We have got a problem, and in a sane world every politician who has willingly supported SSA as it stands since the 1980's should be up on fraud and negligence charges, with decades ahead of them in the Federal Pen.

 

 

Now moving up in scale...

What?  Isn't that bad enough?  Isn't the fact that our National Debt is more than all the money in the world (and that is on the optimistic side) bad enough?

My fellow Americans there is a problem that will hit us, from out of the blue, in the next few years that is not our own Progressive/Socialist/Communist Establishment Elite Politicians or of their making.  Not by intent, at least.

Nation States can give the instant aura of legitimacy, the patina of something being 'real' and 'working' even when such schemes they put forth make zero economic sense, at all.  Why?  Because they can tax the hell out of their people.  The US started running another Ponzi style scheme in the home mortgage market and the advent of the 'securitized' home mortgage by Ginnie Mae (my article on that and the destruction of the traditional mortgage market).  In this system the government 'guarantees' the risk of home mortgages via the 'securitized' system by bundling loans together.  Thus we saw loans that were pure junk get AAA ratings when they were bundled together via the fiat of government regulation.  Those regulations are still on the books, by the way.  Thus banks were forced into working with this market arrangement if they wanted anything to do with the home mortgage market, and if they didn't Fannie and Freddie had started to move in with their even higher risk loan capabilities that gained the benefit of the 'securitized' market.  That is how we got a multi-decade housing bubble: by government regulation, forcing banks to accept government assessment of risks, and then cutting down the amount needed to get a home to zero.

Didn't work so hot, did it?

Now imagine a country that does that with residential real estate, like we did, commercial real estate (that is slowly coming out here, too), and industrial real estate and facilities.  In other words a country that has its entire economy built on a bubble of bad debt that it is unwilling to own up to, but must do so as the creditors it invited in want their money out in the securities that they were given.  That country is not the United States.

It is China.

I wrote about that in The Directivity of China.  The reason I more or less live my life by trend analysis is that once a trend is established it will continue unless its underlying causative factors change.  To get its industrial growth in the 1990's, China issued debt obligations: they promised to pay back the money with a nominal rate of interest.  When those notes came due in the mid-2000's they 'rolled over' the debt as in 2003-2006 China looked pretty safe, all things considered.  Now the next debt 'roll over' has arrived and the creditors want their money plus interest.

China's problem is that it did with its entire real estate, commercial and industrial sectors what the US did with 'securitized' loans: it gave junk loans the imprimatur of being good loans via its ratings.  In fact those loans were crony capitalist loans that went to making factories that were not well run and failed.  Luckily the cronies, being cronies, could get more money by hitting up their friends in the government to continue on the patina of 'everything is working just fine'.

Thus the Con Men are the Chinese government, just as it was the US government for SSA, Fannie, Freddie, Ginnie, etc.

The plants for this, in China, are the crony capitalists and some foreign capitalists willing to take on some risky loans that might get a high payback.  Some factories actually moved to China for its low cost labor force.  Meanwhile as industrial plants failed, the government absorbed the debt, called it 'AAA delicious', and rolled over their Marks as they had established a good Rube environment in the west.  To this day you hear about how 'China is a world beater' and then hear about them having enough empty rental property to house the entire US population (Source: Marketwatch, 03 AUG 2010).  China has overbuilt entire cities expecting ever increasing wealth, and yet cannot find people to occupy them (Source: Kris Cyganiak at BuyRIC, 08 MAR 2010) even though the government assures everyone that their people are growing so rich, so quickly, that they just don't have time to move to them (Source: WSJ, Andrew Batson, 12 MAY 2010).

If that last bit sounds a lot like a Con Man trying to convince the Rubes that the game is working, and even better than expected, then join the club.  The problems of China go far beyond industry and have to do with the population, demographics, and just sheer size of China.  Yes China is the world's second largest economy.  Just as it was in 1900.  Size will get them there even on absolute poverty as the median for standard of living.  The problem is that with the debt come due, the current Marks wanting to be paid, and having put so much into so much useless building, China has nothing to repay with.  The cost of labor in China has increased, due to the cost of overhead, in turn that is due to the over-building and speculation that has gone on, which, in its turn, is based on bad debt.  When the debt gets called in the rest falls apart, and building gleaming new apartment complexes with no one to fill them does not a modern city make.  This is repeated in the commercial sector, with empty shopping malls created via crony construction companies, and private real estate via the same system and bundling together of bad loans with the AAA perfume. 

 

In the near future we may come to the point where any 'security' even glanced at by a government will be assumed to be junk in its status, and it won't matter which government it is, either on a global basis as they will all be assumed to be in bed with their cronies running a con game on their people.

And when China slips below the waves of solvency, just where will Wal-Mart get its stuff?

Probably Indonesia, Vietnam and a few other places... but that lovely market that everyone talked about in the 1970's... you remember the one that would see the glorious infusion of western capital to build up a wonderful system as part of the global trade concept... what happens when that drops of the radar screen of fiscal solvency?  The US can't save it as we are nearly there, ourselves, just not going at the fast rate of China.  And we can't solve the problem by spending more money.

The source of the problem, if you haven't guessed it, is not the small time cons like Madoff or even Enron, both bad enough, and, for the horror of it all, the penetration of our international financial system by organized crime.  That latter is horrific, but cannot be matched by the willingness of Nation State political systems to rip off their own people under multiple guises and not be held accountable for their actions until it is too late.  The problems in China, alone, dwarf anything that any organized crime organization could even dream of due to the scale of the population involved.  Even the Daly Machine in Chicago realized it needed to pick up trash regularly to have the patina of 'working' on its side.  Nation States are only under that much obligation to the extent they allow their people a say in their own systems, which is why it is necessary to have Plants to encourage the Rubes to buy into a scheme to become Marks... or to force them into the scheme, anyway, even if they don't buy into it.

Nice how governments over-ride good sense, isn't it?  Notice how that is also the pre-requisite to running a con game?

 

How do you identify a con game?

Whenever you approach a situation, and it doesn't matter if it is a proposal from government or an offer from Luigi down the street to do your windows, the question you first have to ask is: who is going to really benefit from this?  They may tell you that you will benefit, but you then have to ask who besides you will benefit?  Now with Luigi that's just a contract situation of money for services.  For a government it is taxes for a whole slew of things, that just keep on getting longer, many of which have no benefit to you, whatsoever.  If what you hear is that it is you, and only you, that will benefit, and this is not God talking to you, then you have properly identified a con game. 

Get rich quick?  A con game. 

Easy money? A con game.

A sure way to pick the ponies learned in ten minutes? A con game.

Retire with assured benefits that no one in the market can guarantee?  A con game.

A majority services economy makes everyone rich without making anything? A con game.

Do you see how this works?  Unrealistic expectations guaranteed to come true.  That is a con game.  When perpetrated as part of a system to separate you from your money it is called either fraud or taxes.

Some systems are set up by well meaning Rubes that then turn into a con game with no one running it save a bureaucracy. That is SSA, Fannie, Freddie, Sallie, Ginnie, etc. and while SSA can't lobby Congress, the others can and do so for their own bureaucratic interests.  Of course the bureaucracy has an innate goal of perpetuating a con game once it starts, and they will deny any concept that they are running a con game, even to themselves.  Pournelle's observation on bureaucracies is that in all bureaucracies you have those wanting to do their jobs and those wanting to grow the power of the bureaucracy, and the latter always come to dominate the former.  Thus no matter how 'good' a bureaucracy starts out, it quickly morphs into a large, power-hungry, cash driven organization wanting more and more at each step along the way.

 

Once you identify the con game, you then have to ask: who is the Mark?

You are the moment you realize you must ask that question, especially if it is in the middle of a con game.

You are the Mark.

You are being defrauded and you may already have paid a lot of money into a system that 'promises' to pay you back.

The system will only pay you anything so it can turn you into a Plant, to continue the patina of legitimacy it has.  Most Marks never get a chance to become Plants, unless it is a truly huge fraud scheme.  For the most part you have a low likelihood of becoming a Plant as a proliferation of Plants shows that the scheme is about to be revealed.

Have I mentioned that SSA is running in the red?

When you are the Mark in any normal scheme, you must stop paying into it.  There are very few schemes where you can out-swindle the swindlers and maybe get some justice, if not your money back, but those are so rare they need fictional accounts to glamorize them as they don't happen that often in daily life.

If you can't stop paying, say the government requires you to pay into a system involuntarily, then you must recognize that you have losses of throwing good money after bad that will, most likely, never come back.  Everything you paid into the system is gone: you have been swindled.

You are the Mark, the target of the swindle.

If you have any say into the system, at all, you must exercise it to end the fraud and cease the swindling.

The Rubes will attack you as mean, stupid, vicious, hating people, unrealistic, heartless, cold, cruel... remember that before you thought about it you were a Rube, once, too.  The willing Mark is the worst sort of Rube as they want to deny reality and want to willingly live in a fantasy land to their last breath.  Or their last dollar, which will probably come first. 

If you try to ignore the problem, you become a Plant to give shade to the Rubes who continue to push Marks into the system.  And if you worry about the other Marks or those Plants who can still become Marks, you do them no good whatsoever by creating more of them by letting the system go on with your nodding assent.  And that doesn't help your situation, as you are still being swindled, nor the situation of the other Marks, and while you feel sorry for the plants you could certainly find a better way to tend to the ends you desire than via the con game you are in.

Remember that in all cases, you are the Mark: you are the victim of this fraud.

You were born Free.

You can get back to being Free by ending the con game.

Your choices are:

1) The Plant - Hoping you get in on the game early enough to get out of it and offer the game an air of legitimacy.  That makes you culpable for continuing the game, however.

2) The Rube - The mindless repeaters, nodders, those agreeing to the game without thinking and those shouting down the critics of the con game.  They are the backers of legitimacy, and can't believe that they will ever be a Mark.

3) The Mark - The sucker.  The person who gets swindled. The loser. The target of the fraud.

4) The Free - Those who ensure their freedom by the hard task of guarding it, thinking about what they do, and trying to end fraud high and low when it is perpetrated upon them and their fellow citizens.  This is the hardest to do.

The choice of what you are is up to you, once you identify a con game.

Getting to Free is painful.

Waiting for the game to come apart even more painful.

You can either end it and gain Freedom, or wait for it to be ended and continue to the The Mark.

We Shall Suffer

At Big Government's site, Paul A. Rahe has an article looking at Restoring Constitutional Government and it is a telling article in what it says on that need, and what it does not say.  It is a thread tying piece or a 'dot connecting' piece, save that it is not pointing at the dots but the necessary connections between them and then examining how and why they fit together.  The basic analysis of where we are, as a Nation, is sound: founded on principles of federalism plus one of checks and balances (not only within the federal government but between the federal government, States and the people), there is a necessity for a republican form of government, that is multi-branch form of government with divided powers, to be held to account to those it governs.  As Mr. Rahe puts it:

The challenge was straightforward. Polities situated on extended territories sit at a great distance from the vast majority of the people whom they rule. This is consistent with despotism; and if the distance is not too great, it is consistent with legitimate monarchy and the rule of law as well. But for republics it poses a problem. Governments at a distance from the people they rule tend to be invisible; and when human beings are invisible, they tend rightly to suppose that they can get away with a lot. Moreover, large polities tend to face emergencies more often than small polities, and emergencies require from rulers vigor, alacrity, and resoluteness of the sort most easily provided by a man who can act alone. The challenge facing the American Framers was to devise a constitutional structure capable of producing a government fit for meeting emergencies but unlikely to become, as James Madison once delicately put it, “self-directed.”

That requirement for a republic has fallen apart, in ancient times, with distance and disassociation between those who govern and those who are governed by them.  This was a worry at the time of the Framing of the Constitution, and was brought up not only on the Anti-Federalist but the Federalist side as well. When that happens you get despotism and tyranny via a powerful central government system.  In dividing powers, limiting powers and putting checks and balances on powers, the US Constitution was so drafted as to keep that National government to a very few tasks to the benefit of all the States and the people. 

Jerry Pournelle has summed this up in a very different way that our Nation is approached linguistically. 

The old way: 'The United States of America are...'

And the modern way: 'The United States of America is...'

The first recognizes that we are States come together to form a Nation, and thus while we are united we are not unitary.  The second is the unitary approach of a single object, in which there is no recognition of the sub-divisions of the Nation.  When you move from the plural to the singular you are then moving from the familiar and diverse to the distant and singular.  It is a subtle form of address from the backwoods of TN in the early 20th century, but telling in that even until that point the former, diverse outlook view, was the one that held.  Yet that difference between address and how you mentally approach this Nation has a vast gulf between it, and when you want the entire Nation to do something, to follow something, and have no exception to it, you are looking at the singular unit as the diverse pluralistic system does not allow for such easy binning of a Nation to do things.

That change in linguistic approach and the mental attitude behind it changed with the coming of the Progressive Era of the late 19th and early 20th century, which fundamentally altered how we approached our Nation and its government, plus our role in it.  The Progressive Amendments to the Constitution changed the power structure and accountability structure in two major ways.

First is the direct taxation of income at different rates, not at a set amount.  Attempts to do this prior to Amendment XVI in 1909 were struck down by the Supreme Court as an over-reach of federal power and something specifically prohibited by the Constitution.  This single provision added to the Constitution gave the federal government the power to tax you directly based on income, and then government could decide how to favor or disfavor sections of the population via the tax code, which could not have been done previously.

Second is the direct election of Senators by the people in Amendment XVII in 1912.  Prior to that time Senators were appointed by the States and acted as representatives of State governments in the federal structure.  Thus their power on treaties and confirming individuals to appointed offices allowed the States to have a direct say into the way this Nation approached other Nations so that no State would be left without a say in those matters.  Once put into place the check and balance against federal power from the States was diminished and the federal government now merely needed assent of representatives and Senators directly elected who did not have ties to State governments.  This effectively put National power into the hands of political parties, to which they were both quite agreeable to take.

Legislatively things were going on which would also begin to centralize power into the federal government.  Following the Hague Convention of 1912, which many evangelical organizations had called for in 1909 to go after the opium trade, came the Narcotics Tax Act of 1914.  Prior to this time all medical laws were State and local run: there had been prohibitions on opium in many cities, just as many cities and States banned the sale of alcohol.  That pluralistic method was one that was in-tune with the Constitution as this was not the domain of the federal system.  The Hague and Shanghai treaties would give the first basis to attempt to gain a federal overview of the narcotics trade to prevent the harm it was doing to society.  Prior to that the federal government had put in place labeling laws so that what went into a product had to be on its label, so you could know what it was you were buying.  There is not much data for the short period of time between that and the Narcotics Tax Act, but what little of it that there is indicated a change in the purchasing habits of citizens away from narcotics laced drinks and medicines.  Unfortunately for many that had suffered war wounds that remained painful (ex. US Civil War, Spanish-American War, Indian Wars) this meant the slow drying up of medications that had the negative effect of addiction and the positive effect of lessening the pain: to those who had already sacrificed we now made them suffer.  By the time of 1914 the Nation was getting the first taste of what the change from 'are' to 'is' would be like, and federal regulations would be crafted to skirt Constitutional requirements so as to get to desired effects: the stamps necessary to purchase marijuana, as an example, were never printed and yet you required one to have marijuana and to register that you had it, a classic 'catch-22' in which you were penalized for having a good without a stamp and could not get the stamp and asking for the stamp with the good landed you in jail because you didn't have the stamp.  While provisions of these early laws were struck down, enough were left to point to the ways the federal government could control substances at a National scale without any say from the State governments involved... as they were no longer involved by that point.  No matter how 'moral' the law is meant to be, it is enacted in one of the most lethal ways to concentrate power and authority into the hands of the few, not keep it dispersed amongst the many.

The next major legislative change came with Public Law 62-5 in 1911.  This law sets a definite size of the House of Representatives in Congress by the fiat chosen number to be the size of the House in 1911.  Prior to that, and the only way mentioned by the Constitution to get representatives was by floating proportion.  The proportion could change but required an Act of Congress to do so.  Floating proportion allowed for the number of representatives to increase as population increased and for a very short period of time the speed of communications was not keeping up with population growth (that would be the last few years this would be true) and it was felt a set-size Congress with States getting seats by their size would be representative enough for all concerned.  This further cemented power in the hands of the political parties as it allowed for the formulation of 'safe districts' via 'gerrymandering' which would see certain sub-regions of the government never get truly contested elections between parties save for major demographic changes... changes which the parties would then adjust their districts for via the Statehouses so as to retain a stranglehold on the concept of 'safe seats'.  This changed the way the citizenry elected representatives, and while we see modern elections in which it is rare that 30% of the incumbents are turned out of office during any election cycle, prior to this legislation it was rare when 30% were returned to office.  Additionally the turn-out for the non-Presidential election years has dropped steadily, consistently since the early 1960's and it is now difficult to get half of those eligible to vote to actually vote, and it is normally far below that percentage and has been for decades.

Get how that 'concentration of power' stuff works, now?

This is, at its heart, divide and conquer politics applied to a limited government, federal system of republican governance.  It has been a multi-pronged, decades long offensive against divided, limited government that is decentralized and leaves power in the hands of individuals.  The heart of Progressivism is that in a 'modern' State it is the largest government that is best fit to rule and, to that end, the input of the citizenry reduces the effectiveness of the bureaucracy and enforcement of its rules and edicts.  Complaints against the older, limited government form of State was that it wasn't active enough, intrusive enough and even had problems getting a quorum together in the Senate, meaning the government's functions often went unfunded for months.  The government, in order to be effective, needed a way to ensure that representative democracy was 'streamlined' so that the 'modern' State could be 'more efficient' and manage National affairs from its level.

This notion derives from the conceptual framework of the socialist end-state ideal of the State in which the workers become enlightened, throw off the capitalist class and create a dictatorship of the proletariat.  That form seen in the First International was the 'hands off' form of socialism as it utilized a viewpoint that as capitalism spread it required a more informed working class to operate and that would serve as the seeds of its own destruction.  That would take time, decades or even centuries, but was an assured outcome.  The Second International moved to a position of being able to nudge or otherwise 'help' capitalism to come to its end, faster, and to blunt the worst abuses of it.  Both of these international congresses of socialists agreed that this would take place in industrialized Nations, first, and then spread from them.  It is in this era between the Second and Third (or Communist) congresses that Progressivism takes off: before WWI and the rise of Communism in Russia.  Progressivism takes part in these 'futurist' and 'modern' views of the State which was born in the mid-19th century as part of an end times views that were showing up in religion, as well.  In many ways socialism is a religious movement with beliefs that man is both good and perfectible, and that such perfection will only come with enlightenment at the end of the capitalist system.  Further Progressivism puts forward that the State can take a pro-active role in fostering that end and enforce moral views of the already 'enlightened'.  Mind you the number of splinter groups, factions, off-shoots and such that are spawned by the 'enlightened' tend to demonstrate that the only central theme they can agree on is power for the 'enlightened' to bring 'enlightenment' to the masses.

What is fascinating is that those paleo-socialists had a fundamental criticism with this approach: it doesn't work and actually makes things worse, and does not bring about the end-state desired by socialists.

Their reasoning is fundamental: capitalism must do its good works in the way of education, spreading jobs, and uplifting the working class from absolute poverty.  Capitalism is not a purely negative force in this view, and that it has a logic to it based on the personal basis of capitalism which gives it flexibility and adaptability.  Nation States are the exact opposite in being rigid, inflexible and unable to adapt to much of anything.  When later socialists attempt to marry socialism to capitalism at the Nation State level what you do not get is a path to socialism but a path to the worst form of capitalism around, which is State Capitalism.  With the power of the Nation State behind capitalism, all the good parts of the capitalist system are removed and the State then becomes tyrannical against the working class and forces it to submit to whatever it will pay for work and there are no incentives to improve the system for material goods or moral reasons.  The pursuit of power becomes its own end-state, and when centralized in a government that has co-opted private capitalism, it is an un-enlightened end-state as those within it (no matter their intentions) succumb to the path of power to enforce everything.  Instead of the State withering and dying in the new socialist end-state, it flourishes and crushes the working class to the ends of its ruling class.

By that internal reasoning of the old line socialists what we see, today, is the work to remove the restraints upon government to intervene in the Nation's economic affairs.  'Radicals' of the sort seeking to tear down the system to re-make it are not on a path of any sort of 'progress' in any venue.  Their objective of removing economic liberty so as to enforce political doctrine means that individuals are not 'enlightened' but 'organized' to the ends of the State.  And while man may be good, as individuals, the Nation State is seen as an embodiment of negative capacity as that is necessary for the survival of not only capitalism but all prior systems.  The illogic of not having a Nation State and still having a centralized ruling organization is never addressed by socialists nor by the somewhat more distributed anarchosyndicalists who still see a need for a larger decision system.  This is the sort of stuff that passes for 'enlightenment' amongst socialists, communists, progressives and liberals, when they can formulate their ideas into words. 

By trying to use chaos to bring about political order such destructive progressivists and liberals miss what has happened previously in the form of human liberty to associate and create new social order that is not created from the top, but from the bottom.  Such knowledge is already in the hands of the majority of the population and forms the basis for our understanding of distributed decision-making as seen in the works of Hayek in modern times and as far back Founding of the United States with Franklin, Washington and Monroe.  This foundation of understanding is not modern and is rooted in the understanding that the Nation State is not an outgrowth of systems (capitalist, mercantalist, feudal, imperial, etc.) but of human relationships started at the lowest level between individuals.  This concept is spoken of as the jus gentium or Law of Nations, which is unwritten but derives from Nature and our ability to think and feel for each other.  As unwritten law it can be written but is non-binding, save for what Nature places upon you.  Thus when we read about ancient cultures that have had little to no contact with each other (ex. Ancient Greece, Chinese Empires, Mayan Empire, Incan Empire) or that have formed separately from each other with little cultural continuity in time or space, we still find the basics of how humans act at this scale to come forward.  If you read about diplomats or emissaries between States you instantly know that there is protocol between these States, recognition of boundaries (although those may be in dispute), recognition that the cultures are separate and have differing cultures, and that there is a system of exchanges that backs such stories in history.

When Marxists, socialists, progressivists, and statists put forward that the State is the pinnacle of human achievement and that it can look after all people within it on a personal basis, you are seeing a rejection of Natural Law and derived historical understanding about how humanity operates.  States are not imposed from the top, downwards, but built from the bottom, upwards.  It is not possible to tip the pyramid on its head and insist that the State pre-exists humans and creates humans to live within it and that is the upshot of uplifting to State to a pinnacle of superiority and believing that all power emanates from it, and not from the people within it.  From that socialists of the oldest First International sort are correct in their criticism that later socialists/communists/progressivists/liberals are creating a system that is worse than private capitalism by making the State the ruling part of it, but they, in turn, are misguided by believing that the State can be dissolved at any point by not recognizing that human nature creates States and Nations as a natural part of human interaction.  To their end, then, they must diminish human culture and ties so as to institute their end-state.  Unfortunately the description of man ruled due to being in a condition of continual anomie towards his fellow man is not one of a utopia, but one that is best described as animal savagery.  For every 'good' the State does 'for' you, takes up 'for' you, and puts you at a distance from your responsibilities, you are degraded in a step-wise process from a functioning person creating a society to an animal accepting hand-outs from a State until you finally get fed up with that and bite the hand that feeds you.

On the large scale I have already described how that has worked, to remove limits on government, take off the checks designed to hold it in place, and to make it powerful enough to dictate your economic choices by political fiat via the tax code.  That is only the start of the process of getting the individual, that is you, to be dependent upon government.

Consider the proposition that you are asked to take money from your children and grandchildren to support yourself.  You would consider that a desperate situation to be in, no?  And you would ask your children and grandchildren for support, not just take it from them, right?  It would not only be immoral to steal from them, but unethical as these are your children that you have cared for and loved, and wish to see have a happy life.  Stealing from them, especially early in their working life, would hurt them immensely and make it nearly impossible for them to stay above water, financially, and would make them poorer, later in life, as they could use their earnings early in life to help create a better wealth stream for themselves later in life.  The damage would be great not only in the present, but in the future as well.

The system of Social Security, run through the SSA, is just that, with some frills of a Ponzi Scheme added in, with a front man telling you there is a secure, interest earning 'lock box' that when you put your money into it, it is 'safe'.  Unfortunately that 'lock box' has a false bottom in it, and when you see the front man taking the money from it and putting an IOU in it for your cash plus interest, you realize that the front man has told you a lie.  Like any good Ponzi Scheme he is fleecing a large number of people so that when a few do need their money he can just re-cycle current funds over to the people with IOUs.  When you see that the number of people that he can fleece is going to be dropping below what those who are demanding payment want, however, you begin to suspect that your IOU is worthless.  Particularly galling is to see one's children paying into that scheme when you know it cannot, possibly, pay for your IOUs and that theirs are worthless scraps of paper as the scheme will soon implode.  Maybe you will be lucky and be dead by then, right?

There is no way to 'fix' this system as demographics and population size to output needs invalidates it, as it does all Ponzi Schemes.  Changing the 'pay out' date by pushing back your retirement by some years is not a 'fix' but an attempt for you to take money from your children and others in society to pay off the promised IOU.  In attempting to 'get yours' you will just shift the shaft from yourself to your children, when you know that the system is broken.  It is immoral and unethical to do that when you have the power within you to change the system and not accept the 'payouts' and to then ignore the system, entirely, and treat it as a form of tax used to curry favor amongst a segment of the population: because that is what Social Security is.  It is a tax used to give money to an older generation that should have been saving to meet their own future needs and taking that money from the younger working generation that desperately needs it.  Since your thievery is via government, that allows you to wash your hands of the taint of being a thief.  And yet your agreement to the system makes you part of it, does it not?

That creates long term suffering in the way of debt that we pass on to our children when it is our responsibility to pay off our debts and not to burden our children with it.  In not enforcing our responsibilities upon ourselves, in not demanding that taxation for favoritism stop because we might be beneficiaries of it (if we are 'lucky'), we agree to create our own suffering.  And as government has no need to be thrifty, nor can it 'invest' its funds, it loses money between what you 'pay in' and what you 'get', along with bureaucratic overhead which also eats into the 'benefits'.  It costs money for other people to look after you, and when government does it they do it 'good enough for government work'.

We suffer as a society so government can be 'nice' to us individuals.

So long as you like being treated by a government functionary as a supplicant, that is, for that is what you have become.

Yet that is not the role of government, is it?

To turn you into a third-hand thief and supplicant, is that what your goal is in life, especially late in life?

That is the road to savagery not civilization, isn't it?

So what is the way out of this?

The way out is the path of Restoration for you, and I have described that in another piece.

It is the path of personal Honor.

Personal Sacrifice.

Personal Liberty.

That is a hard way to live, yes, but the alternative is too horrific to contemplate.

The Distractocrats

A Distractocrat is any individual involved in utilizing misdirection to distract as many people as possible from examining issues that demonstrate problems in their ideology.  The process can vary from 'throwing someone under the bus' to try and convince people that you now have nothing to do with a divisive figure or someone who has become politically inconvenient to the playing of one of the various cards (i.e. race, class, gender, money, etc.) in an attempt to make an individual pointing out a problem go into a defensive mode to answer spurious charges (ex. In one instance, Spencer Ackerman of the Washington Independent urged his colleagues to deflect attention from Obama’s relationship with Wright by changing the subject. Pick one of Obama’s conservative critics, Ackerman wrote, “Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares — and call them racists.” . . . ).  Distractocrats try to be the masters of distractions and ace character assassins, and they enjoy demeaning, belittling, castigating, and falsely accusing anyone who points out the vacuity, corruptness, or lack of ethics that Distractocrats support.

Distractocrats come in two versions:

1) Leftists - Those who attack the Right, conservatives, Tea Partiers and, basically, anyone who objects to Big Government, high taxes, rampant regulations that can't be figured out, and huge schemes to redistribute wealth from the wealthy to the Distractocrats card carriers.  Often while taking the middle-man's cut in doing so.

2) Rightists - These are actually those who castigate anyone on the Right for protesting against the Leftist Distractocrats, thus enabling the corrosive influence of those Distractocrats and adding their own venom to the mix while purportedly being on the Right.  In actuality they are Leftists claiming to be on the Right for political convenience of a platform to attack the Right.

Thus there are only Leftists Distractocrats.  They support Democrats.  Not all Democrats are Distractocrats, but all Distractocrats support Democrats... save for the few Loony Tunes of the Conspiracy Theorists who enjoy playing their own Alternate Reality version of being a Distractocrat.

Scratch a Distractocrat and you find a Leftist or someone unmoored from reality.

But I repeat myself.

If one attempts to point out the insanity of policy decisions made by a member of the Obama Administration or the cost of Obamacare as drafted by Harry Reid and then burdened with extra-special pork with the House, you are labeled a 'racist'.  That is the current favorite card of the Distractocrats, because everyone has an obvious skin color, thus you don't need to think about who you can label with that term.  This is also played with 'Comprehensive Immigration Reform' save that when it comes to Hispanics one can't point to a 'race', so that card falls flat.  Even the organization of radical hispanics have this problem of not being able to recognize that their concept of race doesn't apply to hispanics who are of multi-ethnic backgrounds from Spain, Portugal, France, UK, Germany and Native Amerinds (North and South).  Thus they live in an Alternate Reality, already, and neither logic nor reason can point out the inanity of calling that general locale designator derived from the European settlers as a 'race'.

To a Distractocrat all racists are white.

Any black person who disagrees with them is an 'Uncle Tom'.

Any hispanic who disagrees with them is told to 'shut up'.

The simplicity is infallible.  The effect on public discourse utterly destructive as it is meant to be, so that it can enable authoritarian and tyrannical laws forced on the majority by the minority who will always tell you they are so much smarter than you and then can't tell you the 'race' of hispanic individuals with multi-ethnic backgrounds.  Mind you, the US is pretty multi-ethnic with inter-marriages between 'races' because we are all equal and love knows no bounds of race, color or creed.

Unless you are a Distractocrat, of course, who are the ones who make up disparaging remarks about those who marry across racial boundaries to upset their notion of what 'race' is.  Thus they are racial purists.  They see everything through a prism of race.

That is the definition of a 'racist': an individual who sees everything through the prism of race.

Distractocrats are racists.

Not all racists are Distractocrats as insanity on race knows no bounds within humanity.  But all Distractocrats are racist.  They love playing the 'race' card to divide people along racial lines so as to divide up culture and keep things simplistic for their limited outlook of their superior mentality.  They 'know better' about what to do and how to find 'code words' that are the new 'racial slurs'.

'Small government' is a racist statement.  'Fiscal responsibility' is a racist concept. 'Not spending the Nation into bankruptcy' is utter racism... to a Distractocrat.  The reverse of all of those will perfect man by enslaving him to government so the Distractocrats can rule them.  Save that some Distractocrats are more equal than others, and those who bring their friends to power usually find themselves at the short end of the stick, first.  Ask the SA about that.  Or the Red Guard.  Or the enemies of Josef Stalin who got to learn, first hand, what 'defenestration' was all about, even when they lust to do it to others (ex. SPENCER ACKERMAN: Let’s just throw Ledeen against a wall. Or, pace Dr. Alterman, throw him through a plate glass window. I’ll bet a little spot of violence would shut him right the fuck up, as with most bullies.)  It is easy to spot the first candidates for defenestration: they openly state they would love to do it to their political enemies, thus giving their political 'friends' the bright idea to try it on the one who proposed it, first.

Distractocrats have no decency, no shame, no morals, no ethics, and a great fear of guns.  Not all gun-grabbers are Distractocrats but all Distractocrats are gun-grabbers.  They can't understand differences between semi-automatic, fully automatic, burst fire, rapid fire, sustained fire, and being on fire... they just don't want to be fired upon.  And for all of the intelligence espoused by Distractocrats, getting armed people angry at you isn't so smart. One really shouldn't  insult the intelligence of individuals who do know the difference between a revolver and a revolving door.

They claim to be mortal harbingers of the ever present and beneficent god State, hate guns and want to grab the gold... inverted Imperialists who still want to achieve Empire, in other words, but don't have the honesty to say so.  They claim that 'experts' can solve all problems and wish to remove your 'amateur' choices for yourself you lead a life dictated by bureaucratic 'experts' which just happen to be the elite political class of Distractocrats.  They obviously see a problem in your life of too much choice and wish to narrow that to their own ends.  They also see that you aren't fit to figure out your inalienable rights and wish to alienate them from you by soothing words and high taxes, followed by the bureaucratic boot to your face.  Their utopia is where you are enslaved by the State, they are your bosses and your entire life is spent in service to them to the good ends they dictate to you.

Don't mind the oceans of blood spilled wherever such enlightened elites try this.

It always comes to blood.

Which is why they don't want you to think, for one moment, that you have the right to defend yourself against them.  They claim their opponents to be uncivilized barbarians who want to return us to the state of Nature, while, instead, that is their main goal and they wish to distract you from it by the use of 'code words', hype, belittling, denunciation of the innocent, and turning the other way when their thugs attack the common man.  That is all to the 'greater good' and the ends justify the means.  That is the Distractocrat credo: their 'good ends' justify any means to get them.

Remember that the next time you hear any accusation of 'racism' being thrown around.  It is the Distractocrats call to arms.  The 'race card' however, is losing its value and is coming apart and delaminating from such frequent playing in every hand in politics.  Don't you worry, they'll have a new card to play, epithets to hurl, people to attack unjustly, demeaning and belittling insults, and the ever present threat of the god State to push at you. 

Their aim is to enslave you to that State. 

To rule you by fear.

Because they are deathly afraid of the concept that all men are created equal and deserving of respect, kindness and that we must set aside some of our personal biases to help each other become a better people.  Distractocrats prefer the lash when lies do not serve.  Speak to them sweetly in reasonable tones and they will ignore you, despise you, hate you, belittle you and generally demonstrate how small they are on the inside because they cannot, for one instant, consider a society of equal citizens.

I do not fear them.

I pity them for their inhumanity towards their fellow man.

I will start no fight with them.

But given one I sure, as hell, will end it.

Brought to you by A Citizen of the Republic

What kind of candidate would I vote for these days?

A very interesting question as I have a very lean outlook on what government is necessary to actually run the Nation.  These days, being mid-DEC 2009, Senator Coburn and  Senator DeMint are starting to speak of the basic things that need to be done by elected representatives, and yet their concept of having one bill and its proposed amendments read out loud, in their entirety, is just a kernel of an idea.  That idea needs to be expanded upon and greatly, so that Americans get small, compact and easy to understand legislation that makes passage of politically corrupting measures nearly impossible.  Thus the type of candidate will back that, thoroughly.

This candidate could be from either major party, any minor party or purely an independent individual wanting to do a hard job in the House or Senate.  Or, more correctly, actually do their job in the House or Senate and not pass it off to staffers.  A candidate of this sort will not be liked by any stripe of progressive, who adores Big Government, and that includes a large swath of members in both major political parties.  And because of that reaction the type of candidate becomes apparent:

The PITA Candidate

PITA = Pain In The Ass

What typifies a PITA Candidate is the willingness to use parliamentary procedures fully, completely and in accordance with every rule in either the House or Senate.  Those who have ever heard of a 'By The Book Strike' in which public employees follow every rule in the book to slow down their work knows exactly how this goes.  Luckily, as each State has representation for the House and Senate, denying the seating of a PITA Candidate-elect because of their stance is a good ground for the State to declare that the State is not being represented properly, in accordance to the wishes of its people, and that all Representatives and Senators are recalled, the assent of the State to perform services for the federal government suspended and that all federal taxation laws are also suspended for the State.

I would imagine this working well in TX or OK or MT, but the financial straights of CA and NY would then make the idea of being able to garnish the federal portion of taxation for the State for 'safekeeping' when the federal government wises-up can't be denied.  Thus the State involved might want some intestinal fortitude, or else it would have a PITA Candidate pointing out how the State does NOT support that Candidate's District or State to have proper representation in the federal government, which is something we fought a Revolution over.

So lets say the House or Senate is wise enough not to do this.  Denying a seat to a Representative who fully wishes to follow the Constitution and all the rules of the House/Senate is NOT grounds not to seat such an individual.  With a certified election, avowal to hew strictly and completely to the rules, and otherwise follow all proper and necessary procedures in either chamber, there would be no grounds, at all, for not seating such a member.  If a comedian can get a seat in the Senate, then a PITA should be able to do so, also, and even act with more civil manners.

What does a PITA do in the House or Senate?

Never sustaining a 'unanimous consent request' for ANYTHING.

Anything to be 'read into the record' gets read, out loud, into the record.

This also goes for the request to later amend and revise remarks, on the grounds that this allows too much into the public record that is not openly presented for the people of the Nation to see and that ALL such documentation worthy of being in the record needs to be publicly proclaimed.  Whenever a member wishes to revise/extend remarks, they must do so in the chamber, orally, in front of the public.  Of course this can be over-ridden with a vote, and the moment that unanimous consent for a voice vote is heard then that, too, is objected to.

All votes for all matters, no matter how procedural, get a real, live, actual, tabulated vote.

Do you see how this is going?  It hasn't even gotten to the introduction of Bills, yet, but just daily procedures.  Like putting the previous day's minutes into the record.  The public really does need to hear those things.

Yes there will be attempts to change the rules, but that is also done with the citation of precedent and that doing so to get around one member is discrimination against a member who was elected to DO exactly what is being DONE, and he is DOING IT as he promised.  Faced with that the house in question either swallows its pride and sticks with history, or chucks out history and goes authoritarian... thus endangering the right of ANY MEMBER to be heard.

Pretty nasty thing to do, that, just to try and get around a PITA.

Very uncivil.  And very, very obvious.

As a PITA Candidate is there to uphold Constitutional government, that means exposing all pay-offs that other politicians pack into bills.  Have all that read into the record.  Point out that 'off budget' deals don't have Congressional backing in the budget and, thusly, cannot get funds allotted to them.  Either things are on the budget or they get passed as separate entities.  A PITA Candidate puts forth that while taking care of pigs is all fine and dandy, the farm is Kosher.

Bills to fund Constitutionally mandated parts of government, such as DoD, DoJ, State Dept, Treasury... all of those with direct mention will get your 'AYE' vote when they are pork free.  Anything else gets a 'NAY' vote.

Wartime funding?  If it needs pork it can't be critical, and if it isn't critical to the warfighter then it needs to be funded elsewhere.  And if it is critical then point out that until offending pork is removed Congress allows the President to have the troops forage, and suggest terrorist bases no matter where they are for food, fuel, and other necessary goods.  Perhaps the Dept. of Agriculture could be raided for a few dollars.  Or Education since they haven't managed to improve the reading rate since Poor Johnny Couldn't Read.

In fact the PITA Candidate has a 'NAY' vote in store for Agriculture, Education, Energy, HHS, and quite a few other things never even whispered about in the Constitution.

How does this 'help' the people back home?  The PITA Candidate is trying to stop up government so that it can't expand and take over more of people's spending money to finance the deficit and the debt.

Are there anything proactive that a PITA can do?  Sure!  First the PITA has no paid for staff and won't accept money for same.  But if the PITA needs something positive to do, then helping Ron Paul to get his Audit The Federal Reserve Bill going someplace would be a great thing to do.  Perhaps work on Privateering legislation to get a few folks monetarily interested in taking down al Qaeda and whatnot.  Kibbitzing on Social Security and Medicare and their insolvency status would be a lot of fun!  And how all the fine folks Upon The Hill can't seem to address the coming bankruptcy of the Federal Government.  Yes, a PITA can get loads of fun pointing out the incompetency engendered by the politically over-elected and the financially under-educated Upon The Hill.

Beyond that take up a fine hobby! 

Cross-word puzzles.  Everyone should have a fine vocabulary, use this as a chance to build it.

Ghost hunting, as there are a lot of dead bills through the decades and more than one of them must have left a ghost behind and you can be the one to capture them.  Hold EVP sessions in the chamber after hours, not that there will be many of those with all the reading of bills going on.  And some very fast flash photography around the Capitol is sure to find the errant ghost or Congresscritter giving you the evil eye.

Find spelling and syntax errors in bills and amendments.  When they are fully read in, ask for the corrected version to be read in.  Remember a badly worded bill is a threat to liberty and you are there to stop that.  This is a fun and exciting past-time.

Put out press releases on each and every day Congress takes off.  Keep a running tally.  Also how many hours Congress is at work during the days it is in session.  Compare your term with those of past Congresses and show how much more work is being done!  You are doing the public a favor by keeping the place open for business.  Take credit for all those hours more that Congress has to work on doing its job.  Because that IS your job, too.  Everyone could use good press because that of a PITA will be abysmal, yet you can point to this as a POSITIVE accomplishment that NO other Congresscritter has ever achieved!

If you are a reader, now is a good time to start Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, unabridged edition.  Or de Vattel's Law of Nations.  The works of Grotius, perhaps?  Actually Law of Nations might give you some hints and pointers on how to be more of a PITA, so I would put that first, then Grotius, then Decline as you can check to see if the US can go faster than you can read the book.

The job might look cushy, but those long, long, long hours running into days, weeks and months which has the Capitol open on a constant basis and Congresscritters tied down to it is actually very hard.  It is not a position for a slacker, but for someone who knows how to put up the greatest amount of civility while ensuring that every rule, condition and voting opportunity is followed COMPLETELY and UTTERLY without remorse.  No liberal or conservative could do it as they all get this urge to 'do something' and then think they can 'make the country better' by spending scads of cash that isn't theirs to spend.  If any of those COULD have done it then it WOULD HAVE BEEN DONE BY NOW.  A PITA Candidate will be hated if elected, indeed despised, yet the quiet demeanor of a librarian would be all that was needed.

Plus a copy of Roberts Rules of Order along with the special rules for the chamber involved.

Yes, I would vote for a PITA Candidate and contribute to them.  I don't have the health to do something like this... but it is a job crying out to be done: running as the Immodium-D of Congress.  A dirty job... and Mike Rowe does have his limits.