My God and Government: 2019

Friday, November 22, 2019

Socialism is Economic Rape

Photo (C) Katarzyna Bialasiewicz photographee.eu / DepositPhotos.com

Tom Sheppard

11/22/2019

When a woman is raped, a man is forcibly taking something from her that she does not want to give him. The rapist uses his cunning and superior strength to overpower his victim and do as he pleases with her, without any regard to her feelings, hopes, or wants. If she resists, and he is able, he will beat her and restrain her so that she will either be compliant, unconscious, or bound and unable to further resist.

Just like the rapist, a socialist government takes what it wants from its citizens without any regard to their feelings, hopes, or wants. The socialist government uses the power of its police and military to forcibly take everything it wants and leave its citizens only with what it feels inclined to provide them. Anyone who is foolish enough to resist the forcible rape is likely to end up in prison or dead.

If you don't believe that socialist governments work this way, then do just two things:

Read (or listen to) The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and
Look at what is happening in Venezuela right now as the populace suffers from scarcity brought about by their socialist government while controlling a land of abundance.

That should be enough to make my point, but if it isn't, you can read some history about

what Adolf Hitler, the head of the National Socialist German Workers (NAZI) party did.
Or Pol Pot, the head of the communist Khmer Rouge who took over Cambodia.
Or the history of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics where Josef Stalin deliberately slaughtered millions of Russians who didn't embrace his plans with sufficient enthusiasm.
Or. follow the adventures of the handsome and charismatic Che Guevara as he tortured and murdered his way across the Caribbean, Central and South America, and Africa trying to 'persuade' people to embrace communism. Wikipedia notes that "... he murdered political opponents, eliminated the free press, and put homosexuals in forced labor camps."
Or, read about Che's good friend Fidel Castro and the prisons in Cuba he has filled with political prisoners who didn't agree with his communist/socialist ideas.

Che Guevara

Communism and Socialism

Just as the puma and mountain lion are the same animal, so too are socialism and communism. Both are rooted in the philosophy explained by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in The Communist Manifesto. The slight difference is that communism actively seeks to do away with all other economic and political orders and run the entire world, while socialism throws nationalism into the mix with the aim of making sure that the socialists from a particular country are all in charge of the world, or at least most of it.

Socialism Must Use Force

Socialism requires that all private resources become owned by or 100% aligned with the purposes of the state. Very few people will willingly give all they have to government bureaucrats. Even the leading socialists in the USA today won't do that. They are hypocrites and liars who don't walk the talk. That means that the soldiers and police will have to come in to force the compliance of anyone who fails to cooperate and behave as the bureaucrats direct.

When socialists come to power one of the first things they do is they use the coercive power of government to forcibly transfer ownership of many companies and even whole industries from shareholders and investors to the government. The government doesn't pay for these companies. This is a direct violation of the Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution prohibiting the government from illegal searches and seizures.

To be clear about this, shareholders are not just a bunch of fat cats with wads of cash. Most retirement funds (like yours) are invested in stocks and mutual funds (which also are invested in stocks). So, when the government takes ownership of a company without paying for it, they are taking money right out of the retirement funds of millions of working-class people, helping to ensure that their Golden Years of retirement are hungry, cold, and poverty-stricken.

You, as the working class person hoping for a decent retirement someday, just got raped by the socialist government.

When socialists come to power, they immediately raise taxes and use the coercive powers of government to seize the property of anyone who fails to pay "their fair share" as defined by the very luxurious-living leaders of the socialist government. Your wages and taxes are both set by a government bureaucrat who decides your wages based not on your wants or needs, or how well you do your job, or how demanding or dangerous your job might be. The socialist government bureaucrat sets your wages at what s/he feels you need in order to survive, because in this socialist utopia there is officially no such thing as "getting ahead." Unless, of course, you become a socialist government bureaucrat and can manage to claw your way up the government hierarchy to a position where some other socialist government bureaucrat above you has decided that your contribution to society, through your amazing government service, is sufficient to warrant a slightly better lifestyle through things like access to the top-bureaucrats-only stores when you can get almost as much decent food as you want, almost whenever you want it.

So, you got raped again either by the tax man, or the some other socialist government bureaucrat who decided how much need to survive.

Of course, you can always live a bit better by becoming a criminal and buying what you can afford through the black market. If you get caught with this contraband coffee or bread, you will likely lose your job, spend time in jail, perhaps even get sent to a re-education facility where you will be shown how much better it is to embrace socialism than to be beaten periodically and work as a slave laborer.

So, you got raped by the socialist law enforcement. They may, in fact, physically rape you to help you realize how good you have it when you are playing by the official socialist rules.

On the other hand, the criminals will always be there. Capitalists in socialist countries are, by definition criminals. Some will be offering to meet legitimate needs for things like good food or decent appliances. Others will be offering protection from the police or other thugs. Either way, unless you throw in your lot with the criminal capitalists, you have no chance of enjoying a life that is any less miserable than all of your neighbors.

Of course, joining the criminal capitalists, you risk getting raped by them, and by the socialists.

The Politics of Envy is a Lie

Socialists build their support using the politics of envy. They pit the 99% against the 1% and feed the 99% on dreams of living in some measure of the opulence of the 99% by taking it away from the 99% and giving a nice piece of it to them. The reality plays our very differently.

When the socialist governments confiscate the property and money of the wealthy 1%, they don't distribute it to the masses. Instead, they use if for themselves. You don't believe me? Consider this, when you take away a million dollar house from someone in a newly socialist state, who can buy it to give you the million dollars it is supposedly worth? The answer is... no one can because no one own owns any personal property anymore so it all belongs to the government. That means the real property of the rich and famous cannot be sold. Instead, it must be used. And who deserves that luxurious house more than the locally appointed government bureaucrat who is laboring so diligently to make sure that no one is holding back any personal property or money, or labor, from the state?

So, not only does the rich owner of the million dollar house get raped by the socialists, so do you.

What about our great jobs! Well, in a socialist state, labor is optimized according to the wisdom of government bureaucrats. You get the job where they think you will make the best contribution to the greater good. And, your boss will be someone who is politically connected within the socialist party, without regard to who is best at the job. You too will not get promoted until you get all the right political tickets punched. And, in a truly socialist society your promotion won't get you any more pay, because you don't need it and giving one person more pay than another would antithetical to the egalitarian notions underpinning the entire socialist philosophy.

Once again, you got raped.

It Won't Work That Way for Us

This is another great lie of the socialists everywhere and in the US particularly. All of them deny or ignore the lessons of the history of abusive socialist governments by treating themselves to the conceit that we are much smarter than all the socialists who have gone before and we will do it right, avoiding the errors and abuses of past efforts and failures.

To believe that we are so much smarter than any who have gone before is simply vanity and conceit.

Just as the leopard cannot change its spots, humanity is powerless to change its nature. You can change yourself, but when it comes to changing someone else, the only power you have to either 1) accept them, hoping they will change, or 2) kill them so that they cannot do or say anything to contradict the perfect socialist fantasy. And that is exactly why socialist governments are renowned for killing millions of their own people before they ever go to war with outsiders.

On this point, about recognizing the flaws of human nature, the men who wrote the US Constitution expressly recognized and made provisions for the fact that human beings are not angels. They even used that term in the Federalist Papers where they explained and made the case for the US Constitution. They had already seen how badly people could behave under their Articles of Confederation and had no desire to repeat their former mistakes in setting up a suitable government for this nation. Nope, I am not giving you that reference, because I want you to spend time sifting through The Federalist Papers to find it yourself and read some advice directly from our founding fathers a little along the way.

Conclusion

Nearly six thousand years of recorded human history, with its repetitive wars, conquests, and countless perfidies both personal and national provides everyone with one clear insight. Human nature has not materially changed in all of recorded history. While some people will act selflessly, there are always enough selfish, greedy people out there that we must build our societies, governments, and laws in ways that will protect us from the depredations of those who are willing to get what they want by taking it from others.

Accepting and supporting socialism is not social justice. Socialism is rape.

References
The Communist Manifesto
The Federalist Papers
The US Constitution and Bill of Rights
The Articles of Confederation of the United States of America (not to be confused with anything associated with the US Civil War or the Confederate States of America)

Tom Sheppard is a business consultant and coach to small business owners and individuals. He is a recognized author with dozens of titles in business and fiction to his credit. One of his endeavors is to help those who want to see their own book in print. He does this through his trademarked Book Whispering Process (TM).

The author is not an official spokesperson for any organization or person mentioned herein.

Your comments are welcome... Please observe some ground rules. No profanity, vulgarity, or personal attacks. Profanity, vulgarity and personal attacks not only betray a lack of vocabulary and imagination, they also are the hallmarks of bigotry, and bigotry is the hallmark of someone who is fundamentally insecure in their views. Facts are always welcome.

Wealthy Socialists are Liars and Hypocrites

Tom Sheppard

11/22/2019

What do Bernie Sanders, George Soros, Elizabeth Warren, Michael Moore, Susan Sarandon, Danny Devito, and Mark Ruffalo (AKA Bruce Banner) all have in common?

They all profess to embrace socialism, but they don't practice what they preach. In other words, they are liars and hypocrites.

Unlike Mahatma Ghandi, who literally gave his all to live his beliefs, these wannabe-socialists don't walk the talk. Not. At. All.

Granted, Elizabeth Warren claims to be "capitalist to the bone." Notwithstanding her very public claim, the policies she proposes are decidedly socialist. So, if it walks like a duck and it quacks like a duck, I am going to call it a duck, or in this case she walks and talks like a socialist, so I am calling her a socialist.

Here is the real test they should all take to see if they are really ready and willing to embrace socialism. Let them give everything they own to charities for the poor (or the government) and make sure they work at least 40 hours per week while only getting an income of $45k per year, pretax. This means they give up their bank accounts, investments, real estate, royalties, and all other sources of income except their job, which will never pay them any more than $45k per year.

Why $45k? Because that is about the median pre-tax household income in the US. In other words 50% of the people in the US live on that, or less. The other 50% live on that, or more. The actual median may be more or less than that, and we can agree to adjust the number to that, but the point is that they need to live by what ordinary, working-class people can expect to earn, and no more.

Did I mention this would be pre-tax? Yes, taxes should be taken out of that gross pay. Take the same amount of taxes out that anyone in that income bracket would usually pay. That means their take-home pay is reduced by at least one-third, down to about $30k+ per year to actually live on.

Let them buy or rent a house, pay for their meals, cars, and transportation with this after-tax income.

Furthermore, regardless of what they do, contribute, invent, write, say, etc. limit their income to that $45k pre-tax ceiling. Anything they get paid above that number goes to the state. They never get to enjoy any fruits of their labor beyond what the $45k pre-tax income can buy.

"I wrote a best-selling book," Sanders told The New York Times in April. "If you write a best-selling book, you can be a millionaire, too."

Bernie Sanders

Bernie, that simply isn't true under socialism. That is only true under capitalism. Under socialism, you don't get to keep the fruits of your labors. All the fruits of your labors go the government and the government bureaucrats give you back what they feel you need to live.

A socialist government owns you, and all you produce.

Ann Schmidt reports that "after receiving pressure to release his tax returns during his presidential bid, Sanders released 10 years' worth of returns ... According to those returns, the independent Vermont senator's adjusted gross income was $561,293 in 2018 and he paid a 26 percent effective tax rate. In 2017, his adjusted gross income was $1,131,925."

So, Bernie would go from an annual income of anywhere from $500k or $1,132k down to just $45k per year. On the low end, that means he would give up 90% of his income. On the high-end, he would be giving up 96% of his current annual income.

Given that his campaign workers had to go on strike just to get him to pay them $15 per hour, do you really think he would be happy to give up all that income and live on $45k per year? I don't think so.

How much would they be giving up?

According to my research, what follows are the estimates of net worth of the folks I named above, in ascending order.

Bernie Sanders (Net worth estimate: $2 million)
Elizabeth Warren (Net worth estimate: $12 million)
Michael Moore (Net worth estimate: $50 million)
Susan Sarandon (Net worth estimate: $50 million)
Danny DeVito (Net worth estimate: $80 million)
Mark Ruffalo (Net worth estimate: $20 million)
George Soros (Net worth estimate: $8,300 million)

While this is a lot of money, net worth doesn't really tell the whole story of what they would give up if the USA embraced socialism, as these folks profess to want. They would give up much more.

Net worth represents the total value of your assets less the debts associated with them. So, if you have, as many of these folks do, a house worth $1 million and it has a mortgage of $500k, the net worth of that house is $500k.

Under socialism, you would not only get that $500k mortgage cancelled, you would also lose ownership of and the use of that million dollar home.

All their private planes, mansions, luxury cars, fine foods, expensive clothes, etc. would be taken from them. They would all become property of the state and they could only buy what they could afford on their $45k per year (less taxes) salary.

Does anyone really believe that these very wealthy people would be at all happy about giving up ALL that they have earned and ALL that they may yet earn, for any reason, ever? No, they don't want to give that up.

They want YOU to give up your opportunity to ever become wealthy like them.

Capitalism = Opportunity

None of these people inherited their wealth. They all earned it by their skills and ingenuity in a capitalist economy that lets people vote with their money for the most skillful and ingenious by paying for goods and services. Under socialism, the economic mechanisms that allowed them to attain their wealth would not be available to them, or anyone else.

So, if they say they want socialism, and socialism would take away all that they have, and they don't want to give up all that they have, what is it that they really want?

Actors like Sarandon, Ruffalo, and DeVito would be paid by the government only what a bureaucrat decided was appropriate. Likewise movie directors such as Michael Moore. And, when their performances waned in value for the state, their privileges would be curtailed or revoked and they would soon find themselves living hand-to-mouth, like every other impoverished citizen. Oh, and when they produced a "block-buster movie" they would still only get paid their $45k per year, no matter what the show did at the box office or in video sales all over the world. As good socialists, they would all be happy to see that their acting and directing efforts produced such a wonderful cash flow for the state.

In a socialist state, wealthy investors like George Soros would not exist, nor would they be allowed to exist. Their very activities would be unlawful. Soros himself would likely be killed outright, or arrested and convicted on trumped up charges of treason against the state. Regardless of the path of his fall, all his wealth would be confiscated, with selected holdings made available for use by social party loyalists and those in political power.

What do they really want?

I suggest that what these wealthy "socialists" want is not socialism. What they want is a form of oligarchy where they are the aristocrats and no one else is allowed to enter their ranks, except through either birth to aristocracy or by power politics in the government.

As aristocrats, they would retain their wealth and their privileges. Further, they would pass these on to their children in perpetuity. As aristocrats, their children would have unequaled opportunities to rise to political power, along with all its perks.

In their world, aside from themselves, the government would be the sole vehicle for attaining the perks of wealth and privilege. No other profession, outside of government, would control the spigots of wealth. Those spigots would only open for those whom the power-elite and the aristocrats decide is worthy of living an abundant life.

Everyone else will need tighten their belts "for the greater good" and learn to live without.

References

L Maxim Lott, 30 April 2019, Lifestyles of the rich and socialist: American celebs who blast capitalism while making millions, Fox News, https://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/lifestyles-of-the-rich-and-socialist-american-celebs-capitalism-millionaires

Ann Schmidt, 21 November 2019, What is Bernie Sanders' net worth?, Fox News, https://www.foxbusiness.com/money/bernie-sanders-net-worth

Anne Sraders, 21 May 2019, What Is Bernie Sanders' Net Worth?, The Street, https://www.thestreet.com/lifestyle/bernie-sanders-net-worth-14678955

Michela Tindera, 20 August 2019, How Elizabeth Warren Built A $12 Million Fortune, Forbes Magazine, https://www.forbes.com/sites/michelatindera/2019/08/20/how-elizabeth-warren-built-a-12-million-fortune/#1eecc607ab57

Taylor Nicole Rogers, 28 June 2019, What George Soros' life is really like: How the former hedge-fund manager built his $8.3 billion fortune, purchased a sprawling network of New York homes, and became the topic of international conspiracy theories, Business Insider, https://www.businessinsider.com/george-soros-net-worth-wife-sons-news-house-career-2019-6

The author is not an official spokesperson for any organization or person mentioned herein.

Monday, July 22, 2019

Moving Toward the Future While Enjoying the Present

Tom Sheppard

7/22/2019

A few years ago my wife and I were in the process of moving out of our home of 23+ years. The process was very wrenching for several reasons.

The last two of our five children were born while we lived in this house and all five of our children had come to adulthood while we lived here. So, the home itself had a great amount of our hearts and lives invested in its very walls. The fact that our move was more or less being forced on us made the whole issue of leaving the house painful in itself. Also, moving meant getting rid of lots of accumulated "stuff." Much of that stuff was accumulated based not on monetary value but on sentimental value. Every parent knows what I am talking about. The pictures your children brought home which you hung on the fridge, etc.

In the midst of all the chaos of packing boxes, loading a moving truck, and emptying the house we came upon a box with this picture laminated and taped to the top of the box. At the time it struck me as a sort of message from God, so I took a picture of it and shared it with my wife.

I admit, amid the pain of the move it was cold comfort. Still, it did help me to push aside my own emotional upheaval and focus on what might be on the horizon, even if at the time the view ahead was a bit murky.

From this experience I learned to not put so much of myself into "stuff." The things we accumulate break, tear, wear out, and are eventually discarded. However, the things we do can remain alive in the hearts and minds of ourselves and those whose lives we touch.

Now, to me it seems like surrounding myself with a lot of stuff seems a lot like living in the past instead of looking toward the future. If we don't turn and face the future, it is going to smack us hard on the back of the head, because it will arrive whether or not we are facing it. I have found I would rather be looking ahead so that I can manage things coming at me much better than when I am living in the past, or looking to the past.

Don't get me wrong, I think we all need to examine our history (personal and otherwise) to learn from mistakes (and successes). And, we need to take those lessons learned and look at what is coming toward us and happening around us and see if we can use them to help us succeed amid all the noise and chaos of the present and the visible future. The problem comes when we stand there looking only backwards. Too often we are staring back at failures we experienced, and they are keeping us from succeeding in the future. Likewise, we may be staring back at our "glory days" believing that the best of us is now in the past. Being fixated on past successes is almost as deadly as being fixated on past failures.

Learn from the past, don't try to dwell there. On the other hand, facing the future doesn't mean trying to dwell on it either. What we see on the horizon may never end up at our feet. This may be because it turns aside, we turn aside, or we die before that coming wave reaches us. Instead of dwelling in the past, or fixating on the future we must live in the present and apply all our cunning, knowledge, and energy to making today as wonderful, valuable, and lively as it can be.

The author is not an official spokesperson for any organization or person mentioned herein.

Thursday, May 23, 2019

Racial Supremacy: A Color-Blind Problem

Tom Sheppard

5/23/2019

IN today's Deseret News there is an "in-depth" article asking "Are white supremacist attacks and hate crimes getting enough attention from federal law enforcement?" In addition to the primary question, the author, Matthew Brown, posits another question, "why racially motivated violence is on the rise?" Tellingly, the author points out that "the steady climb in the number of hate crimes in America pre-dates the Trump administration."

The plain admission that this increase pre-dates the Trump administration should be enough to allow any reasonable person to set aside any prejudice (or bias) against our current POTUS and look beyond his administration for answers to the questions raised.

My thoughts on this went away from the question of attention from the Feds and instead focused on exploring why racially motivated violence is on the rise. Because the article specifically points to white supremacy, I will share my thoughts on this with the backdrop of white supremacy rather than focusing on any non-white related hate crimes.

Racial Supremacy Comes in All Flavors

Let me begin by stating that I categorically reject racism and racial supremacy. I find racism an abhorrent exercise in ignorance, prejudice, and hatred. Let me also be clear that I utterly reject the notion, injected into some or our middle school textbooks, that racism is only about whites being prejudiced. It may sound a bit crazy to say it, but racism is color blind, it is not a whites-only crime. To put a point on it, in World War II, the Japanese believed they were "the superior race." They disdained, and institutionally treated as less than human, the Chinese, Koreans, Filipinos, Vietnamese, whites, blacks, and anyone who was not Japanese. In that regard they were both a perfect and ironic partner with the Nazis of Germany who believed in the superiority of the Aryan race. The unrealized reality of World War II is that had the Axis won, they would have eventually, inevitably, gone to war against each other. The racial imperatives of their respective platforms would have forced it to happen.

Closer to home, the preaching of the likes of Malcolm X, Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, and Jeremiah Wright, are by any rational measure both anti-white and black supremacist.

Al Sharpton

Jeremiah Wright

Mainstream Media Promotes Racial Supremacy

Psychology has very well documented the "fight or flight" autonomic response people have to threats. The simple reason for a rise in racially motivated crimes is a rise in racial supremacists of all colors. Add to this the media barrage against white males which has been going on at least since the days when Carrol O'Connor put forward the ignorant bigot Archie Bunker as the epitome of the white working-class man and a rise in "white supremacy" is bound to follow. The white supremacists are feeling threatened by legal, societal, and media actions which undermine the perceived foundations of their legitimacy and threaten their ability to be taken seriously and heard in the public square. While many will flee this conflict, at least for a while, an increasing number will feel their backs are against the wall and will feel compelled to take a stand, perhaps even a violent stand, against those who seem to trying not simply to un-empower them, but to wage a war of extinction on them.

Racial Violence is a Reaction to Racial Supremacy

The reality is that racial and hate crimes will continue to rise as long as two things are happening. 1) As long as racism is institutionally supported and 2) while racial supremacists are being widely heard.

Because of the 1st Amendment we cannot deny racial supremacists their place in the public forum. However, we can continue to combat institutionalized racism. Right now, the majority of institutionalized racism exists in Hollywood. Movies and television shows for at least the last twenty years have typically portrayed the straight, white, male (Archie Bunker) as everything from a mere buffoon to an evil villain. Favorable portrayals of straight, white, males in sitcoms on national TV was limited to Tim Allen's Last Man Standing, which the major networks cancelled regardless of its ratings.

When you couple unrelenting media bias against straight, white, males with the unvarnished willingness of the mainstream media to lend credibility to racial supremacists who are attacking whites and trying to invoke misguided notions of racial guilt and racial shame it should be no surprise that the result sometimes is violence.

All Racial Supremacy is Founded on Lies

The problem with all this racial supremacy is that it is all founded on falsehoods. The reality is that brown, black, white, red, yellow, pink, or otherwise, we are all one race. We are the human race. Whatever genetic anomalies have occurred over the millennia which created the diversity of our skin colors has not created multiple versions of the human race. So, if we want to feel superior, let's revel in the superiority of the human race, and quit stressing over our skin colors, hair colors, eye colors, etc.

To justify their enslavement of Africans, for a time Europeans promoted the notion that Africans were actually a species of ape. They promoted the notion that Africans were not of the human race, but were a simian race. Not only has science put that silly notion to rest, it was never more than an attempt to rationalize the treatment of fellow human beings in an inhumane way by pretending they weren't actually human. Even today, to succeed, racial supremacists must demonize their opponents, changing them from human beings into some incarnation of evil or vile stupidity.

Just Say "No!"

So, the next time you see a TV show, or someone in front of a crowd (in person or on Facebook), calling those who disagree with them "evil", "idiots", "brainless", "stupid", etc. take a pause and realize that the speaker is trying to dehumanize those who disagree and by doing that is directly promoting the sort of unreasoning hatred and disdain that leads to both the crimes of racism and genocide.

The answer, however, is not to respond with equal vitriol and insults. Rather, it is to make calm, rational, fact-based responses and to disengage when others clearly lose their hold on sanity and devolve into foul-language riddled rants which are aimed to incite emotion rather than citing fact and appealing to reason. As I have said elsewhere, learn to disagree without being disagreeable.

The author is not an official spokesperson for any organization or person mentioned herein.

Tuesday, April 9, 2019

Detoxing the Internet

Disagreeing Without Being Disagreeable

By

Tom Sheppard

4/9/2019

Civil discourse is a hallmark of a civilized society. Civil behavior is based on people accepting and abiding by a set of common rules for behavior. With the advent of social media it seems that civil discourse has suffered a nearly fatal blow. It seems no one can comment on a news article or a social media posting without either enduring the abuse of some ill-mannered internet troll, or engaging in the online equivalent of a bar-room brawl.

When I was a young man, my mother taught me how to disagree without being disagreeable. Others may have learned this while participating in a debate club. Regardless, there are a few simple rules which enable civil discourse. What follows are seven simple rules for civil discourse.

1. Assume good intent – Consciously make the assumption that those who disagree with you are:

Sincere – they believe what they are saying.
Honest – they are speaking from a place of integrity and not deliberately lying.
Good – they want a world that is better than what we have today.

2. Don’t demonize – This follows closely on the notion of assuming good intent. When we demonize those whose views differ from ours, we turn their honest difference into a battle between good and evil. Demonizing makes you blind to the good in others and paints everything they do, regardless of intent or outcome, as something evil that you must oppose or denigrate.

3. Don’t deify – This ties closely to not demonizing and is the opposite side of the same coin. When we deify our own views we assume perfection and the mantle of total goodness in oppositions to the evil of our opponents. This will often lead to condoning the inexcusable in those who share our views and condemning the innocent mistakes of those who oppose us. We become blind to our own faults and those who agree with us, and paint everything we and ours do, regardless of intent or outcome, as something good that must be supported and cannot be criticized.

4. No ad hominem attacks – Dictionary.com defines “ad hominem” as an adjective with two meanings:

1. “appealing to one's prejudices, emotions, or special interests rather than to one's intellect or reason.”

2. “attacking an opponent's character rather than answering his argument.”

The ad hominem is the most common tool of the Internet Troll, who, when confronted with inconvenient facts or an intractable opponent resorts to insults. E.g., “you must be an idiot to believe that”, “looks like you drank the Kool-Aid for them.” As soon as you resort to insulting someone with a different view you have lost your argument and your credibility.

5. Separate facts from belief or opinion - it is fine to include facts, beliefs and opinions. Just don’t put forward a belief or opinion as a fact.

6. Take time to back-check your facts – no one wants to be guilty of spreading lies or presenting fake news. Fake news seems to boil down to one of four types:

1. Outright Lies (whoppers) – presenting as facts things which never happened.
2. Soundbite Lies – twisting facts by ignoring or omitting the context.
3. Defense Lies – twisting facts by ignoring facts which might not support your point.
4. Presenting opinions and beliefs as facts. Use reasonably vetted sources for your facts. Just because Snopes.com says it is or isn’t so, doesn’t make it true or false. Read your sources with a critical eye to see if they are playing to your own biases, or those of others.

7. Apply the Golden Rule – Yes. It is old fashioned. Regardless, it is tried and true that if you treat others with same level of respect you want from them, you will likely have a more pleasant interaction.

Some may argue that civil discourse is irrelevant and useless. I disagree. The reason we engage in discourse is to understand and to be understood. Ultimately, we are hoping we can persuade others to our viewpoint. Following the rules of civil discourse may not bring others to embrace our views, but failing to follow them ensures that they won’t even be listening to us. Uncivil discourse poisons the well of communication and leaves us all deaf, dumb, ignorant, and stupid

The author is not an official spokesperson for any organization or person mentioned herein.

Friday, March 22, 2019

Are You Too Selfish for Socialism?

Ocasio Cortez in Action

Tom Sheppard

3/22/2019

There are lots of folks today talking about the wonders of socialism. OCA and Bernie Sanders are both promising free education and free healthcare. There seems to be lots of support for their ideas from the so-called Millennials. But, I am not sure the Millennials, or anyone else, is really selfless enough to live with real-world socialism.

FREE EDUCATION - NO STUDENT DEBT

You won't have to worry about student debt under socialism. But, it isn't because the education is free. It is because most people won't be allowed to go to College. You will take tests along the way from your earliest years. Based on the tests you will be assigned a job or allowed to further your education in the field that the tests indicate you will succeed at, if the government has need of people with that degree.

If you don't have good enough test scores to convince the government to send you to college, you won't be able to go work in your Uncle's business, because having a business is subversive and illegal. You won't be able to start your own business either, so you can say goodbye to any dream you might ever had of living a life of abundance. You will spend the rest of your life leaving the dream of Nietzsche, living a life of quiet desperation.

If you are one of the ones lucky enough to be selected to go to college, you can forget about taking a year off, or even a semester off. If you don't get good enough grades, you will be removed from college and assigned a job. Also, you can forget about frat-house parties and college pranks.

Education is a serious government business under socialism. It is your civic duty to do your best, and to complete your college education as quickly as possible so that you can begin to contribute to the society that paid for your education.

College bacchanals WILL get your thrown out of college. If you don't end up taking a detour through jail, you will count yourself lucky as you put your dreams of college in the trash and take the job the government assigns you to, even if it is working at a collective farm, picking potatoes in Idaho.

One last point. As a college student, don't even think about staging a sit-in, or mounting any other kind of protest. That will get you beaten, thrown out of school, and carted off to a re-education camp in North Dakota, or the Bering Straits of Alaska. If you survive that, you will never the see the inside of a college again, unless you are assigned to be a janitor there.

Just to recap on the Free Education under socialism:

You won't get to go to college unless your test scores in high school were good enough.
You won't get to stay in college if your grades don't stay good enough.
There won't be any partying at college for you, or anyone else there.
If you are thrown out of college for bad behavior, you WILL go to jail.
If you flunk out of college, you will work at whatever job the government assigns you to, even if it is manual labor on a farm in Idaho.

Of course, you will be happy to accept all these conditions, because you believe everyone shouldn't be selfish, and you want to be a good citizen, doing your civic duty.

Zero Unemployment

If the socialist government hasn't quite progressed to the point where they assign your job (they haven't yet in Denmark), that is simply because the unemployment problem hasn't gotten bad enough yet. When it does, they will fix unemployment by guaranteeing everyone a "good paying" government job. You will take the job they assign you, or you be labeled a subversive and you will go to jail and get re-educated to quit your selfish ways, or it will kill you.

Live Rent Free

You won't have to worry about rent payments or house payments under socialism. You will live in the apartment that a government official decides is appropriate for you. Most of them will be very much like the public housing projects of the poverty stricken inner cities of the US today. They will be cold, gray, lifeless buildings designed for their use, not wasting anything on pleasing aesthetics.

No House Payments Either

Forget about needing to save up to buy a house. You won't get a house. Ever. Unless you manage to become one of the very, very top 1/2 of 1% of government officials. And when you get to that level, you not only have a house, but you can go to stores that are stocked like an average supermarket here in the US. Below that level, you won't see anything that even vaguely resembles a Kroger, and certainly not a Wal Mart.

No Big Utility Bills

If the USSR (70+ years of socialism in practice) is a good indicator, although the costs for your electricity will be low, you won't want to leave the water running too long in the shower under socialism either. No long-hot showers. And make sure to turn off the lights when you leave your apartment. Because the state is paying the hot water bill, if you use too much that makes you both selfish and a subversive. And, if they label you a subversive, your life is pretty much over. First you will go to jail. When your trial comes up, they will find you guilty and sentence you to spend some time in a re-education camp where they will beat all the selfishness out of you, or you will die as they try it.

You may think I am painting an overly grim picture here. However, I am actually doing two things. First, I am carrying the tenets of socialism to their logic ends. Second, I am looking at what has actually happened in socialist countries.
Read on for a few tidbits from history.

The Soviet Union was supposed to be “a society of true democracy,” but in many ways it was no less repressive than the czarist autocracy that preceded it.

From The Fall of the Soviet Union, The History Channel

Housing in the USSR

Communist Era Housing in Russia

"Poverty and privation drove people from the countryside, while Soviet official industrialization campaigns encouraged (and sometimes forced) their movement to cities. From the 1920s into the 1950s, a significant number of Soviet families lived in communal apartments, while many lived in worse conditions in barracks or "dormitories" (mass housing for workers). For many families, gaining a room in a communal apartment represented a step up in their housing, especially if they found themselves in the most desirable cities of Moscow or Leningrad. Like Iraida Yakovlevna from "A Room for Her Daughter," many people without housing, especially people from the rural areas, tried to get work as janitors so as to gain a room in the city.

"In the Soviet Union, housing in cities belonged to the government. It was distributed by municipal authorities or by government departments based on an established number of square meters per person. As a rule, tenants had no choice in the housing they were offered. Rent and payment for communal services like water and electricity did not form a significant part of a family's budget. They did not cover the real costs, and were subsidized by the government.

From Communal Living in Russia

Free Education

"The goal of education policy was to teach the masses how or read and write, and channel talented young people into science and technology. It was oriented more towards meeting the needs of society and the state rather than fostering individual development. Schools were free, compulsory, universal and classless and were used disseminate Communist doctrine as well as educate children. The set of ethics stressed the primacy of the collective over the interests of the individual. Therefore, for both teachers and students, creativity and individualism were discouraged.[Source: Library of Congress, July 1996 *]

"The Soviet system dictated what classes university students would take and decided what jobs they would take after they graduated.

From Education in the Soviet Era

Zero Unemployment

"the right and the duty to work were enshrined in the Constitution of the USSR"

From The Soviet Union Achieving Full Employment

There were no unemployment benefits.
If you were out of a job for more than four months you were legally labeled a "parasite" and could go to prison.

Millennials and Socialism

Jessica Litras, a self-confessed Millennial, notes five reasons Millennials are considered selfish. Along the way, she notes a few points which, although not selfish, will definitely get you on the wrong side of a socialist government. Her five points are:

Glued to their phones - we have adopted the innovative life.
Love social media - we like to promote our lives and our accomplishments.
Spend lots of money - we are more concerned about living in the present than denying ourselves something so we can have a better future.
No rush for marriage or kids - we don't want to share our lives with others or reproduce
Put themselves first - we make decisions based on whether or not it will make us happy.

Here is the rub. Each of these things won't play well in a socialist world where every act, every word, every thought, must first be about how does this make things better for everyone else?

The innovative life - Innovation is based on creativity and creativity is based on individuality and the opportunity to explore different ways of looking at things. Looking at things in an unapproved way in a socialist country is how you get to be unemployed and unemployable, if not in jail.

Promoting yourself and your accomplishments is all about you, the individual. That is about as anti-socialist as you can get. There is no place in socialism for the needs, wants, or accomplishments of the individual, unless they are for the good of everyone.

Spending lots of money - good luck with that. Money, as we know it, doesn't exist in socialism.

No rush for marriage or kids - "we don't want to share..." That pretty much says it all. Selfish behaviors are frowned on in socialism.

Will it make us happy? - Socialism is not about your individual happiness. It is all about the happiness of the collective. If you make decisions because they make you happy, eventually the socialists will throw you in jail for it.

Litras admits that "It’s made millennials open, outspoken and more comfortable with not only what they to say, but the person that they are."

All of this little jaunt through some historical facts entirely avoids the human costs of implementing socialism. It doesn't speak to the millions who have died because they were 'too selfish' to live a life dedicated to the common good where even their thoughts and every word had to be unoffensive to the government and its officials.

The bottom line here is this. The propaganda and misinformation about socialism is that it is all about doing what is good and right. The reality is that socialism is all about doing and thinking what you are told to do. No more, and no less. So individualism, all those things that make you who you are, those things that make you standout, they are not tolerated in socialism.

The only thing tolerated in socialism is blind obedience to the orders of those above you.

Is that really what Millennials want? I don't think so. But, it is what they are working hard to get.

The author is not an official spokesperson for any organization or person mentioned herein.

Wednesday, March 20, 2019

The Constitutional Right And Social Obligation To Carry A Gun

Tom Sheppard

3/20/2019

I was looking at a website promoting products related to lawful concealed carry of firearms. The site included a video testimonial in which the piece below was referenced. Curious, I looked up the reference and found the article below. Originally penned more than a decade ago it is a little dated, however its fundamental points are unaltered by time. If you are wondering about whether or not is right to carry a firearm, you should give this article serious consideration before deciding. You should also consider whether or not everyone has an inalienable right to defend themselves.

"if our lives are endangered by plots or violence or armed robbers or enemies, any and every method of protecting ourselves is morally right."

Cicero

The Constitutional Right

And Social Obligation To Carry A Gun

By Robert H Boatman

The Author and his estate have granted permission to reprint it in full or in part as long as attribution is given to Robert H. Boatman

There’s an old wisecrack, true as witticisms, proverbs and aphorisms usually are. It goes like this - funny the things you see when you don’t have a gun.

Suzanna Gratia (now Gratia Hupp) was having a pleasant lunch with her parents in Luby’s cafeteria in Killeen, Texas, when she saw a pickup truck come crashing through the wall. A man armed with two guns and plenty of spare magazines emerged from the truck and started shooting everyone in sight, including Gratia’s mother and father. Al Gratia was shot fatally in the chest. Ursula Gratia was shot point-blank in the head. More than 20 other people in the cafeteria were murdered in cold blood before the killer turned one of his guns on himself and blew his own brains out.

Suzanna hid under a table, clutching her purse which normally contained a .38 revolver. In deference to Texas law at that time, which prohibited carrying concealed weapons on one’s person, she had left her gun in her car. Several more dead diners had guns legally and inaccessibly locked in their cars. Suzanna Gratia Hupp has vowed never to make that mistake again, though such pronouncements always come far too late.

“The decision to follow the law cost me the lives of my parents,” she says. “There is not a day that goes by when I do not think about that.”

Not long after the Killeen massacre, John Taylor and Craig Godineaux knocked on the locked front door of a Wendy’s restaurant in New York City. They called out to the manager, Jean Dumel Auguste, by name. Taylor was familiar with the operation and layout of the restaurant, having worked there for a short time before he was dismissed for theft. The manager opened the door for Taylor and Godineaux and led them to his basement office. Minutes later, he used the store’s intercom to summon his entire night crew of six employees down into the basement for a meeting. What followed was one of the worst massacres in New York history.

The two armed killers herded all seven Wendy’s employees into a walk-in refrigerator, bound their hands, gagged their mouths, covered their heads with plastic bags, ordered them to kneel on the floor, and methodically shot each person in the head with a small-caliber pistol at point-blank range. They then stole about $2,000 in cash and left. New York law and Wendy’s corporate policy had prohibited the victims from arming themselves.

All of the people involved in these incidents were, in a profound way, responsible for their own deaths or the deaths of loved ones. They were equally responsible for the deaths of innocents who dared associate with them and, by abstract extension, for the deaths of everyone ever killed in similar circumstances. Anti-gun laws and policies are always complicit in the execution of innocents. And it’s appropriate that survivors are always ashamed of their inadequacy.

In the final analysis, to face evil with impotence - whether out of cowardice or feeble-mindedness or submission to foolish laws - could well be responsible for the death of society.

Suzanna Gratia Hupp decided to fight back. She set out to change the foolish laws. She turned her anger on her legislators who had “legislated me out of the right to protect myself and my family.” She joined the crusade for the right to carry concealed weapons in Texas and she ran for the state legislature. She was successful on both counts, though not in time to save the lives of her parents.

Today, Rep. Hupp has some harsh words for those gun-control fanatics who come out of the woodwork every time there’s a mass slaying like Columbine. “Why is it that mass shootings now seem to always take place in schools and post offices, places where guns are not allowed? They’re always in these so-called gun-free safety zones.” Like Luby’s cafeteria.

Five Wendy’s employees - Ramon Nazario, Anita C. Smith, Jeremy Mele, Ali Ibadat and Jean Dumel Auguste - took their shame to their graves. There was no good reason on earth why it had to end that way.

A scenario almost identical to that of Wendy’s in New York began to unfold at Shoney’s restaurant in Anniston, Alabama. Two armed robbers took over the restaurant, which was filled with two dozen customers and several employees, and started to herd everyone into the restaurant’s walk-in refrigerator. But this time a smart employee, Thomas Terry, drew his concealed .45 and shot both of the bad guys before this particular mass execution could take place. In a matter of seconds, one criminal lay dead, the other incapacitated, and more than two dozen innocent people had been handed back their lives thanks to a man who had a gun and was not afraid to use it. Thomas Terry, bleeding from a grazing wound to the hip, was happy to play the hero with so many lives at stake.

And still they ask, Why do you carry a gun? What are you afraid of? Do you think some nut is going to drive through the wall and start shooting everybody? Do you think a couple of hardened criminals are going to shove you in the refrigerator and execute you? To which you can only reply, Do you think when you walk out of here and cross the street you’re going to be hit by a truck?

Only when the custom of carrying a gun once again achieves its deserved high level of social legitimacy and political priority will this country get back on the track of respect for human freedom and dignity that has set it apart from the rest of the world for two centuries.

The Anti-Freedom Zealots

Ask any American and he’ll tell you he believes in liberty. To a point, of course. All too often, when liberty goes beyond the inalienable right to choose one’s own brand of mouthwash, the cold fear of freedom begins to seep into the bones.

Cheering on the fear of freedom are those quivering souls steeped in terror at the thought of independent decision-making and freedom of action on the part of their distrusted fellow man. These anti-freedom zealots are members of the well established international community of political ideologues who have brought you such gun-control activists as Joe Stalin and Chairman Mao. And since at least the 1930s it has been clear that even The Land of The Free has its share of these political low-lifes. We must face the fact that the anti-freedom zealots have made their American home in the left, or “liberal,” wing of today’s Democratic Party.

Anti-freedom zealots live in a wayward universe of their own making, a cosmos where nature is contradicted at every turn, where responses to every problem are suicidal measures as certain to make the problem worse as showering gasoline on a housefire. The upended logic of these fanatics is stunning: If there’s a problem with bad guys shooting good guys, then let’s make sure the good guys don’t have guns.

Criminologist Cesare Beccaria, writing in the 18^th century, had a word to say about anti-freedom zealots. “False is the idea … that would take fire from men because it burns, and water because one may drown in it … The laws that forbid the carrying of arms are laws of such a nature. They disarm those only who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes. [emphasis added] Can it be supposed that those who have the courage to violate the most sacred laws of humanity, the most important of the code, will respect the less important and arbitrary ones, which can be violated with ease and impunity, and which, if strictly obeyed, would put an end to personal liberty. Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides …”

Many Americans today have been taught by propaganda disseminated in the mass media that guns lead dangerous lives of their own. Thus the notorious anti-gun politician, Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) describes a rare and highly desirable sporting rifle in the following terms: “This kind of weapon can blow up a limousine, a helicopter, can take out a vehicle, armored vehicle, maybe a mile away. It can shoot through seven buildings!”

One wonders why the rabid Mr. Waxman and his ilk don’t use similar words to describe the lethal five-gallon bucket, an evil instrument of death which drowns twice as many children each year as are shot by America’s 250 million guns.

Anti-freedom zealots are both helpless and hopeless. They are like decaffeinated coffee, de-clawed cats, or poorly bred dogs who’ve been easily persuaded to forego their natural hunting instincts in order to avoid minor electrical shocks and so tend to have recurring problems with their weakened nervous systems.

Sarah Brady of Handgun Control Inc, has said, mimicking Clinton’s pathetic duck-hunting argument, that “the only reason for guns in civilian hands is for sporting purposes.” Anti-freedom zealots like the Bradys and the Clintons need to be informed that to save one’s life is not a sporting purpose. There’s nothing sporting about it. If it takes a full battle-dress M-16 or AK-47 to get the job done, well, that’s what they’re for.

In their terminal confusion, anti-freedom zealots pay lip service to a Constitution they don’t really understand, but in every act and every thought, whether out of total ignorance or deliberate intent, reveal that their mission is to facilitate the destruction of the Constitution and its replacement with an unnatural ideology most of us thought rusted to bloody dust a long time ago.

Anti-freedom zealots are a malignant danger to all life on Earth as we know it, because their anti-self-defense, anti-gun position is an expression of the most utter contempt for individual human life it is possible to conceive.

Anti-freedom zealots see nothing wrong with leaning on their neighbors to provide them with personal protection even though they would never consider returning the favor. They worship their effeminate fantasy of an all-powerful government with true religious fanaticism [my point exactly in Godvernment]. They believe all other humans are as mentally weak, irresponsible, incompetent and self-hating as they know themselves to be. And they encourage only civilization’s most self-destructive tendencies.

To be charitable, anti-freedom zealots are unthinkingly naïve, stone-blind and cowardly. To be frank, they are the evil seeds ultimately responsible for all the crime, war and needless violence the planet has ever seen.

Paradise Lost

In the beginning, weapons grew on trees.

In the lost paradise of our species, every man, woman and child was armed to the teeth with the finest state-of-the-art killing machines society could produce, and all was well. As man grew more sophisticated and his weapons grew even more effective at protecting weaker citizens from stronger ones, the first evil caveman genius saw that, as a precursor to the enslavement and destruction of his intended victims, all who would dare resist him must first be disarmed. In the name of peace. In the name of social harmony. In the name of common sense. To save the children. Evil geniuses, and evil idiots, have been singing that tune ever since. And the more gullible among our species have all too often danced to it.

The now-dead Peter Shields, founder of the radical anti-gun Handgun Control Inc, sings, “If attacked, put up no defense. Give them what they want.” [they may just want to kill you, like Johnny Cash sings, "I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die."]

The aforementioned anti-gun politician, California Rep. Henry Waxman, sings, “If someone is so fearful that they're going to start using their weapons to protect their rights, it makes me very nervous that these people have these weapons at all!” Few politicians in today’s unabashedly socialist Democratic Party have not at some time joined in the anti-gun chorus or made up worse verses of their own.

In the recent past, half of American voters demonstrated that they are capable of dancing to anything if it has a simple beat and a catchy tune. They cheerfully elected and reelected to the highest office in the land a psychopathic criminal and traitor of the lowest order, a thoroughly dishonest and evil man who devoted his entire personal and political life to the eradication of timeless human liberties Americans take for granted.

Few American voters have even read the Bill of Rights, brief as it is, much less understood its meaning and significance. How do you think they’d feel on any given day about a total re-write? As the ghost of Bill Clinton fades back into the putrefied swamp from whence it came, we must remember the lessons learned.

Niccolò Machiavelli cautioned as early as the 16^th century that the demise of the armed citizen meant the end of civic virtue and, with it, the end of the people’s control over their own destiny - and a very fast end at that, as he observes in The Art of War: “Rome remained free for four hundred years and Sparta eight hundred, although their citizens were armed all that time; but many other states that have been disarmed have lost their liberties in less than forty years.”

Whom are we to trust with our lives and our liberties, other than ourselves?

Carrying A Gun Is An Absolute Right

The framers of the Constitution were under no pressure from the NRA when they wrote “… the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.”

In the same spare sentence, they reaffirmed their historical preference for a “militia” over a standing army, and indicated that this militia should be composed of armed citizens - citizens of a “free state” whose right to keep and bear arms must never be infringed. Anti-freedom zealots, including academic invalids and the hypocrites of the mis-named American Civil Liberties Union, have stood on their pointy heads in tortured attempts to misinterpret this sentence ever since. Those of us who know how to read the English language have no trouble at all.

The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. THE RIGHT OF THE PEOPLE to keep and bear arms shall NOT be infringed. The right of the people TO KEEP AND BEAR ARMS shall NOT be infringed. The right of the people to keep and bear arms SHALL NOT BE INFRINGED. What part of NOT do the illiterates out to subvert the Constitution NOT understand?

The Constitution of the state of Pennsylvania (adopted September 28, 1776) allocated more words to make the point even more unmistakable: “XIII. That the people have a right to bear arms for the defence of themselves and the state; and as standing armies in the time of peace are dangerous to liberty, they ought not to be kept up; and that the military should be kept under strict subordination to, and governed by, the civil power.”

Indeed, the individual right to keep and bear arms for personal defense is based on exactly the same principle as civilian control of the military. One wonders if the ACLU would argue with that.

The Second Amendment, like most other articles in the Bill of Rights, was adopted from the English Bill of Rights of 1689 which, in turn, was based on centuries of English Common Law. English jurist Sir William Blackstone observed that the English Bill of Rights clearly meant that Englishmen possessed “the right of having and using arms for self-preservation and defense” and that “having arms suitable for their defense” was one of the five auxiliary rights people possessed “to protect and maintain inviolate the three great and primary rights,” the first of which is “personal security.”

Unfortunately for the English people, they have been persuaded by their own far-left government and insidious anti-gun activists to allow the English Bill of Rights to be, as they might say, shat upon. Today, the English do not have the right to keep and bear arms for self-preservation and defense. As a direct result, they live in a crime-ridden society that grows worse with each passing day.

The recent 2000 International Crime Victims Survey published by the Dutch Ministry of Justice, a highly respected and accurate measurement of the percentage of people by nation who are victims of violent crimes, ranked England far ahead of the United States (which ranked 8^th), and second only to Australia (where English-style anti-gun laws are also in effect) as the most violent nation. A recently disarmed England now has twice as much violent crime as the United States.

The English Home Office, which cooperated in the survey, has refused to publish these findings in England. It’s better not to remind the gullible subjects how empty were the promises of safety and security for which they so eagerly traded away their very real and priceless freedoms and responsibilities.

The great Roman philosopher and senator, Cicero, immortalized armed self-defense as an “inalienable right” more than 2,000 years before the U.S. Constitution did so. Cicero said:

There exists a law, not written down anywhere but inborn in our hearts; a law which comes to us not by training or custom or reading but by derivation and absorption and adoption from nature itself; a law which has come to us not from theory but from practice, not by instruction but by natural intuition. I refer to the law which lays it down that, if our lives are endangered by plots or violence or armed robbers or enemies, any and every method of protecting ourselves is morally right.

Even people to whom armed self-defense is but a remote abstraction often endorse, without even realizing it, the unquestionable principles underlying the right to carry a gun. Jaron Lanier, writing in Discover Magazine (Feb. 2001) said in reference to new copyright-protection technology - “In a democracy, citizens are supposed to act as partners in enforcing laws. Those forced to follow rules without being trusted even for a moment are, in fact, slaves.”

It is perfectly obvious that we have a natural right to arm ourselves and to kill any criminal or other force that threatens us just as surely as an elephant has a right to kill an attacking lion and a mother bear has a right to kill a wolf grinning suspiciously at her cubs. Animal-rights extremists extend the animals’ right to the killing of humans under such circumstances.

Even the Dalai Lama, Nobel Peace Prize and all, said in May of 2001 during a speech about “nonviolent resolutions to conflict” to 7,600 Oregon and Washington high-school students - “But if someone has a gun and is trying to kill you, it would be reasonable to shoot back with your own gun.” So said the Dalai Lama.

There are criminals among us who are both homicidal and incorrigible. Their parents took a shot at civilizing them and failed. Their school teachers took a shot at them and failed. The odds are overwhelming that government welfare programs and penal institutions took a shot at them and failed. If it ever becomes your turn to take a shot at them, don’t fail.

Carrying A Gun Has Always Been Both Right And Duty

There have been many societies in which not carrying a weapon was a serious and severely punishable crime. This was true in Greece, Rome, Europe, Britain and, though seldom enforced, is still true in certain places in America today. This is as it should be. A citizen who shirks his duty to contribute to the security of his community is little better than the criminal who threatens it, and is better off living in a society that places lesser demands on his capacity to accept responsibility. As cowards from the Vietnam era discovered, that’s what Canada is for.

English scholar Granville Sharpe, who helped bring about the abolition of slavery in England and supported American independence, wrote in 1782 that “No Englishman can be truly loyal who opposes the principles of English law whereby the people are required to have arms of defence and peace, for mutual as well as private defence … The laws of England always required the people to be armed, and not only armed, but to be expert in arms.”

In 1785, William Blizard, chief legal advisor to London’s mayor and city council, stated that “The right of his majesty’s Protestant subjects, to have arms for their own defence, and to use them for lawful purposes, is most clear and undeniable. It seems, indeed, to be considered, by the ancient laws of this kingdom, not only as a right, but as a duty…”

Commenting on the early legal requirement that every American male and every American household be armed, attorney Don B. Kates says that citizens “were not simply allowed to keep their own arms, but affirmatively required to do so.” He further says that these statutes reflect the classical world view that “arms possession for protection of self, family and polity was both the hallmark of the individual’s freedom and one of the two primary factors in his developing the independent, self-reliant, responsible character which classical political philosophers deemed necessary to the citizenry of a free state.”

You don’t have to have lived in ancient Greece or Rome or Middle Ages England or revolutionary America or on the west side of L.A. during the Manson massacres, as I did, to know that anyone who lives in a house without a gun is a dangerous fool.

There have not always been police. England had none until 1829, America had none until 1845, and only in the so-called modern era have police officers been armed. At one time, fear of anything resembling a standing army was so intense that police were, in fact, the only citizens not allowed to carry guns. Throughout much of 19^th century England and America, the policy of forbidding police to have arms while on duty was the only form of gun control.

Police were expected to rely on a fully armed citizenry to come to their aid when armed enforcement of the law was necessary - a circumstance that occurs with growing regularity today.

Armed Citizens Of The 21^st Century

On January 3, 2001, the Citizens’ Self-Defense Act of 2001, intended “to protect the right to obtain firearms for security, and to use firearms in defense of self, family, or home, and to provide for the enforcement of such right” was introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives. Given the current sorry state of our elected representatives, the bill was never expected to pass into law, but rather to serve as a symbol of just how timid, disconnected from reality and contemptuous of liberty most Washington politicians - who would never consider voting for such a bill - have become.

It doesn’t matter. The fundamental liberties reaffirmed in H.R. 31 were never granted by politicians in the first place. The source of these liberties is as old as the first free man. And, as long as man is free, the source will remain.

Included in the Citizens’ Self-Defense Act of 2001 are the following Congressional findings:

(1) Police cannot protect, and are not legally liable for failing to protect, individual citizens, [emphasis added] as evidenced by the following: (A) The courts have consistently ruled that the police do not have an obligation to protect individuals, only the public in general. For example, in Warren v. District of Columbia Metropolitan Police Department, 444 A.2d 1 (D.C. App. 1981), the court stated: “[C]ourts have without exception concluded that when a municipality or other governmental entity undertakes to furnish police services, it assumes a duty only to the public at large and not to individual members of the community.” (B) Former Florida Attorney General Jim Smith told Florida legislators that police responded to only 200,000 of 700,000 calls for help to Dade County authorities. (C) The United States Department of Justice found that, in 1989, there were 168,881 crimes of violence for which police had not responded within one hour. (D) Currently, there are about 150,000 police officers on duty at any one time. (2) Citizens frequently must use firearms to defend themselves, as evidenced by the following: (A) Every year, more than 2,400,000 people in the United States use a gun to defend themselves against criminals - or more than 6,500 people a day. This means that, each year, firearms are used 60 times more often to protect the lives of honest citizens than to take lives. (B) Of the 2,400,000 self-defense cases, more than 192,000 are by women defending themselves against sexual abuse. (C) Of the 2,400,000 times citizens use their guns to defend themselves every year, 92 percent merely brandish their gun or fire a warning shot to scare off their attackers. Less than eight percent of the time does a citizen kill or wound his or her attacker. (3) Law-abiding citizens, seeking only to provide for their families’ defense, are routinely prosecuted for brandishing or using a firearm in self-defense. For example: (A) In 1986, Don Bennett of Oak Park, Illinois, was shot at by two men who had just stolen $1,200 in cash and jewelry from his suburban Chicago service station. The police arrested Bennett for violating Oak Park’s handgun ban. The police never caught the actual criminals. (B) Ronald Biggs, a resident of Goldsboro, North Carolina, was arrested for shooting an intruder in 1990. Four men broke into Biggs’ residence one night, ransacked the home and then assaulted him with a baseball bat. When Biggs attempted to escape through the back door, the group chased him and Biggs turned and shot one of the assailants in the stomach. Biggs was arrested and charged with assault with a deadly weapon - a felony. His assailants were charged with misdemeanors. (C) Don Campbell of Port Huron, Michigan, was arrested, jailed, and criminally charged after he shot a criminal assailant in 1991. The thief had broken into Campbell’s store and attacked him. The prosecutor plea-bargained with the assailant and planned to use him to testify against Campbell for felonious use of a firearm. Only after intense community pressure did the prosecutor finally drop the charges. (4) The courts have granted immunity from prosecution to police officers who use firearms in the line of duty. Similarly, law-abiding citizens who use firearms to protect themselves, their families, and their homes against violent felons should not be subject to lawsuits by the violent felons who sought to victimize them.

[Thankfully, in the years since 2001 many states have issued so-called Stand Your Ground laws which have nearly eliminated such abuses of law-abiding citizens defending themselves. TKS]

In 1987, a year after Glocks were introduced to the U.S., Florida enacted a pioneering “shall-issue” right-to-carry law that has served as the model for the rest of the country. The Florida law affirmed the right of a private citizen to carry a concealed gun and eliminated the abuses so typical of “discretionary” right-to-carry laws that resulted in gun permits being awarded arbitrarily to the political cronies of petty officials, limousine liberals, movie actors, athletes and various other celebrity representatives of the rich and famous crowd, but denied to so-called “ordinary” citizens. The Florida law made it crystal clear that any citizen with basic firearms training and a felony-free record would be issued a concealed-carry permit upon request, period.

Florida’s landmark right-to-carry law was supported by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, Florida Sheriffs Association, Florida Police Chiefs Association and other law enforcement groups. And it was supported by Florida voters.

The media, however, was predictably vociferous in its opposition to the exercise of Constitutionally guaranteed rights, and in its total submission to the party line of radical anti-freedom, anti-self-defense and anti-gun forces. Headlines predicted vigilante justice and wild-west shootouts on every corner. “Florida will become the “Gunshine State.” “A pistol-packing citizenry will mean itchier trigger fingers.” “Florida’s climate of smoldering fear will flash like napalm when every stranger totes a piece.” “Every mental snap in traffic could lead to the crack of gunfire.”

Such dire and colorful predictions, of course, proved totally false. Nevertheless, that same hysterical fear-mongering and bald-faced lying are used even today every time a new state gets ready to pass an enlightened right-to-carry law. In actual fact, the only notable thing that happened for the first five years after Florida passed its right-to-carry law was that, as homicide rates in the U.S. soared, Florida’s homicide rate fell a dramatic 23 percent. A few of the opponents of concealed carry actually had the courage to admit they were wrong.

Thanks to the intensive lobbying efforts of the NRA, along with the tireless grassroots work of politically aware gunowners, 33 states now have Florida-style laws which require the prompt issuance to their citizens of legal permits to carry concealed weapons. Well over half of the U.S. population, more than 60 percent of all handgun owners, live in these free states, yet no more than one to five percent ever apply for such licenses.

Notwithstanding the fact that most people do not carry guns, the mere possibility that an intended victim could be armed with a handgun eliminates millions of crimes every year.

According to the FBI, states with “shall-issue” right-to-carry laws have a 26 percent lower total violent crime rate, a 20 percent lower homicide rate, a 39 percent lower robbery rate and a 22 percent lower aggravated assault rate than those states that do not allow their citizens to legally carry guns.

Professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Florida State University, Gary Kleck, in Point Blank: Guns and Violence in America (Aldine de Gruyter Publishers, 1991) found that “robbery and assault victims who used a gun to resist were less likely to be attacked or to suffer an injury than those who used any other methods of self-protection or those who did not resist at all.”

Convicted felons reveal in surveys that they are more afraid of armed citizens than they are of the police. And well they should be. Armed citizens kill 2,000 to 3,000 criminals each year, three times the number killed by the police. And only two percent of civilian shootings involve an innocent person mistakenly identified as a criminal, whereas the error rate for the police is more than five times that high.

Kleck’s research shows that private citizens use firearms to protect themselves and thwart crime about 2.5 million times a year. Citizens use firearms to prevent mass killings, bank robberies, gang attacks, carjackings, rapes, kidnappings and hostage-takings. They use them to help capture prison escapees and murderers, to come to the aid of outnumbered or ambushed law enforcement officers. Yet only a handful of these 2.5 million life-saving uses of firearms are ever reported in the mainstream press.

If a lot more people carried guns, what kind of a society would we have? Certainly not the kind predicted by anti-gun fanatics. Those hysterical doomsayers have been proven absolutely wrong one hundred percent of the time. Would we have a crime-free society?

Certainly not. Criminals are as natural and immune to total eradication as fruit flies. But a better-armed society would severely limit the violent damage criminals wreak before they are stopped. Criminals are naturally self-destructive. The reasons they are so doesn’t matter. To assist them in their self-destructiveness is the polite and civilized thing to do. Thus another ageless axiom: An Armed Society Is A Polite Society.

In his essay, Behavior Modification And Self Defense, Michael Mitchell writes that laws do one thing and one thing only - provide a penalty for wrongful behavior. The function of laws is to punish people, and punishment is a form of behavior modification. But laws are obviously only effective on the law-abiding populace. Criminals, by definition, don’t respect the law; they make their living breaking it. And fear of punishment is only effective if it is swift, sure and severe.

In these days when the legal system cannot be relied upon to provide effective punishment for criminal behavior, armed self-defense can. It’s definitely swift, as the gun will appear during or immediately after the negative behavior. It’s sure, since, if the criminal doesn’t stop his assault, he will be shot. And most people would definitely call a bullet to the chest severe.

The beauty of armed self-defense is that, because of its immediate, sure, and severe nature, the mere threat is usually enough to stop the behavior. Is it any wonder that states that pass concealed-carry laws experience immediate and obvious drops in crime rates? The violent criminal in these states isn’t nearly as worried about being arrested for his crime as he is about being shot by his would-be victim. This fact fits perfectly with well-established principles of behavior modification.

On the flip side, the crime facilitators (gun control advocates) with their notions that we should submit to criminal assault, reward criminal behavior. The criminal gets what he wants - your money, your dignity, and maybe your life. Since positive reinforcement - reward - is the strongest, most effective behavior modification tool, that criminal behavior is likely to be repeated. In other words, by submitting to criminal demands, you are encouraging criminal behavior.

Mitchell did not say, but I will, that the most effective way to modify the behavior of a criminal is to modify it to the extent that he is no longer capable of any behavior at all.

In 1998, John R. Lott, Jr., senior research scholar in the School of Law at Yale University, authored the most comprehensive and exhaustive study of crime and gun control laws ever conceived, based on the largest data set on crime ever assembled. His landmark book, More Guns, Less Crime (The University of Chicago Press, 1998, 2000), now available in an updated second edition, includes thorough analyses of more than 54,000 observations and hundreds of variable factors across more than 3,000 counties in all 50 states for 18 years.

The assiduously researched conclusions reached by Lott immediately set off a wave of panic among anti-gun fanatics and drew organized, systematic personal attacks of the most vicious and dishonest nature, including death threats leveled at Lott and his wife and children. Yet not a single serious academic challenge of Lott’s research, his methodology or his incontrovertible conclusions has ever been successfully mounted. In fact, Lott’s conclusions have reluctantly been called “bulletproof” even by the liberal mainstream press. Among those conclusions are:

Gun ownership saves lives.
Gun ownership also saves money. Nationwide, each one percent increase in the number of people owning guns reduces crime victim costs by over $3 billion.
Concealed handgun carry by private citizens reduces violent crimes, including rape, murder, aggravated assault and robbery, throughout the entire community and in surrounding communities.
When a state passes a right-to-carry law, crime reduction is immediate and substantial, and crime-reduction benefits continue to grow the longer the law is in effect.
The greater the number of concealed handgun permits issued, the greater the reduction in crime.
Mass shootings in public places are reduced to virtually zero within four or five years after right-to-carry laws are passed - except in designated “gun-free” zones, such as schools, where self-defense is known to be prohibited.
The largest drops in violent crime from concealed handgun carry occur in the most urban areas with the greatest populations and the highest crime rates.
Citizens who do not carry guns benefit equally from the crime reduction which results when other citizens carry guns. The people who benefit most from this “halo” effect are women, children, the elderly and blacks.
Of all the methods studied by economists, the carrying of concealed handguns is by far the most cost-effective method for reducing crime. Each and every concealed handgun permit issued reduces total economic losses to crime victims by $3,000 - $5,000.
Accident and suicide rates are unaltered by the presence of concealed handguns.
The effect of increased penalties for using a gun in the commission of a crime is small.
The Brady Law, other mandated waiting periods, safe-storage laws and one-gun-a-month laws all increase crime, especially rape.
Background checks, training requirements and age restrictions have no crime-reduction benefits.

Bottom line, in keeping with the title of his work, the more guns there are in society and the more these guns are carried by private citizens, the less crime there is.

These are some of the reasons why police, who fight crime for a living and are well aware of the realities of street criminals, support right-to-carry laws for private citizens by an overwhelming three-to-one margin. This is an even higher margin of support for right-to-carry than the strong support voiced by the civilian population.

Policemen are nobody’s personal bodyguards. Their jobs are to find and arrest people who have committed crimes, not to prevent such potential crimes from happening in the first place. Clearly, the responsibility for victim-prevention lies with the victim-to-be.

The Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals (Bowers v. DeVito, 1982) did not mince words when it ruled, “There is no Constitutional right to be protected by the state against being murdered by criminals or madmen.”

What It Means To Carry A Gun

That loaded Glock in your holster is a powerful expression of your Constitutionally guaranteed liberty as an American citizen, your recognition of the solemn duty you have to your fellow man, and your willingness to accept the full weight of a life-and-death responsibility.

When you are prepared to defend yourself, you are equally prepared to defend all of society and all of its guiding principles. Your responsibilities are therefore many - moral, legal and tactical. That is why most people, including lifelong gunowners, experienced hunters and competitive shooters, even in states that freely issue concealed carry permits, do not choose to carry a gun.

Your moral responsibilities are to fire your gun into another human being only when the line of necessity has clearly been reached, and then to fire without hesitation and to full effect. Remember the words of Cicero.

Your legal responsibilities are to justify your actions to those who would call you a criminal at the drop of a hat, and quite possibly to a jury of your peers, most of whom have neither the competence nor the courage to carry a gun in their own defense. Read the findings of the Citizens’ Self-Defense Act of 2001.

Your tactical responsibilities are to carry your gun with confidence, to be well trained in your ability to operate it effectively, and to have instilled in yourself an iron will to use deadly force to prevent or end violence committed against yourself or others. Most of this book is dedicated to your tactical responsibilities, because that’s what will save your life.

Violence happens either at random, or directed toward the obviously vulnerable, or toward someone in particular for a reason. You can rest assured it will not happen at the shooting range when you are all suited up in your speed rig with a plan of action worked out for the coming run-and-gun stage. It will happen when you are home sleeping in your bed, shopping at the grocery store, walking out to get the mail, mowing the grass, at dinner, at church, at the theater.

The most dangerous places in the world are those called “gun-free safety zones” by their ignorant political creators and known by criminals and psychopaths as “safe-to-kill zones.” Even an adolescent school kid can figure out that an advertised killing field where no one is allowed to shoot back is the safest location in the world to carry out a mass shooting. Don’t even consider going to a place like that unarmed, whether it’s your kid’s school or a national park. If you can’t handle breaking the law, don’t go.

The assistant principal of a high school in Pearl, Mississippi, broke the law. He kept a .45 in his car parked on the school grounds. When a deranged student opened fire, Joel Myrick ran for his gun. Two students were killed because Myrick had to retrieve his gun from his car instead of his holster. But the .45 eventually prevailed, and Myrick stopped the massacre long before police arrived on the scene. God only knows how many lives he saved. But assistant principal Joel Myrick wasn’t awarded any medals. Of the several hundred newspaper and television stories about the incident, only a few even mentioned his name. Almost none revealed the fact that he used a gun to stop the killings.

When you bodyguard someone for a while, or when you just live a normal life with your eyes wide open, you realize how vulnerable we all are to becoming another tidbit-of-opportunity in the relentless food chain that sustains the life of this unpredictable world. It’s a realization not of paranoia but of reality. That’s the way it is, always has been, always will be. You can ignore it out of faint-heartedness, deny it out of lunacy, submit to it out of a fatalistic contempt for your own life and the lives of others, or you can face it with courage and intelligence and prepare yourself to deal with capricious reality’s predisposition toward danger.

Most of those dangers can be met with nothing more than a strong I’m-not-a-victim mindset and body language. Many others may shrivel with the demonstration of superior verbal skills. Still others may require a fundamental knowledge of martial arts, a container of pepper spray, a makeshift club, the presence of a well-wielded knife or the sight of a firearm. A few, perhaps one in a lifetime, will not be affected by any kind of less-than-lethal response and will not end until you churn your attacker’s dreams and determination into a chunky red stew and spew it all over the street with a couple of big-bore hollowpoints. The trouble is, you never know when or where that last one is coming.

If you ever find yourself under attack by an armed criminal, you will be on the defensive and he will be on the offensive. In other words, he will have a strong advantage going in. And, though he will not have trained himself to shoot nearly as well as you have trained, he will be far more experienced in the art of killing. The odds are, any criminal who is intent on killing you has probably killed men before, knows how to do it, knows how it feels and likes it. You’re not going to talk him out of it, scare him out of it, or wound him out of it. You’re going to have to kill him.

Studies show that simply brandishing a weapon saves many lives, but I am personally against the idea of waving a gun around while your adversary thinks. The way to overcome his offensive advantage is to strike without warning. Once you make the decision to free your Glock from its holster the entire situation should be over and done with in a second or two. The most important component in practicing your draw is firing the instant you have a sight picture on your target, and continuing to fire until your assailant no longer exists.

More than a century of military and police research tells us that most people, including up to 85 percent of trained soldiers and cops, are psychologically unable to use deadly force in a life-or-death situation no matter how compelling the circumstances may be. If you can’t kill, there is no reason for you to carry a lethal weapon.

Carrying a loaded gun with the ability and will to use it is not a casual fling meant to bring some excitement into your boring life. It is an all-embracing lifestyle and must take precedence over your respect for law, your fear of social criticism, your love of humanity, your wardrobe and your drinking habits.

You can never be unaware of the weight you carry on your hip or under your arm. You can never forget your responsibilities. You must wear your Glock with the same allegiance as your wedding ring. If you’re not married, your Glock is your wedding ring. Wear it for life. Don’t even think about leaving home without it. Be prepared to use it at a moment’s notice. Carry it all the time. And shoot to kill.

“Liberty or death,” the meaning of which is clear and absolute, is but a trivial phrase if you do not carry a gun. For freedom-loving Americans, the five most important words in the English language are, and always have been - from my cold dead hands.

Before his death in 2009, Robert H Boatman authored at least six books on firearms.

The author is not an official spokesperson for any organization or person mentioned herein.

Disclaimer and Warning

This blog expresses My views on religion and politics, they are NOT the official views of any religious or political organization.

Feel free to comment. However, if you leave a comment, mind your manners. CIVIL discourse is the order of the day. That means no profanity or vulgarity and no personal attacks. If you want to insult someone here, you had better be very polite in how you do it, and not use any profanity or vulgarity in the process.

Profanity, vulgarity and personal attacks are the hallmarks of bigotry and bigotry is the hallmark of an intellectually insecure argument.

My God and Government

Friday, November 22, 2019

Socialism is Economic Rape

Communism and Socialism

Socialism Must Use Force

The Politics of Envy is a Lie

It Won't Work That Way for Us

Conclusion

Wealthy Socialists are Liars and Hypocrites

How much would they be giving up?

Capitalism = Opportunity

What do they really want?

Monday, July 22, 2019

Moving Toward the Future While Enjoying the Present

Thursday, May 23, 2019

Racial Supremacy: A Color-Blind Problem

Racial Supremacy Comes in All Flavors

Mainstream Media Promotes Racial Supremacy

Racial Violence is a Reaction to Racial Supremacy

All Racial Supremacy is Founded on Lies

Just Say "No!"

Tuesday, April 9, 2019

Detoxing the Internet

Friday, March 22, 2019

Are You Too Selfish for Socialism?

FREE EDUCATION - NO STUDENT DEBT

Zero Unemployment

Live Rent Free

No House Payments Either

No Big Utility Bills

Housing in the USSR

Free Education

Zero Unemployment

The only thing tolerated in socialism is blind obedience to the orders of those above you.

Wednesday, March 20, 2019

The Constitutional Right And Social Obligation To Carry A Gun

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