The question I ask is not “Who caused the wars?” or “How were wars won?” but “Why were wars fought?” The answer is fairly simple in many cases.  It is resources. In most empire building processes throughout history the acquisition of agricultural land and fresh water is at the root of the conflict. Many argue that racism and religious differences are the “real cause” of war but I believe that these are simply rallying cries to the lowest common denominator of thought. Leaders are opportunists in the sense that they see a conflict smoldering and leap to the chance to become the voice and face of an identifiable group.  They appeal to the racial or religious identity in the broadest, most simple way to organize a force they can control and seize the whole banana ,the same way prison gangs are organized on racial lines or “terrorist” groups are built appealing to the most basic instincts of “Us vs Them”.

Lying below all this is usually some perception of material  inequality. This is why I wrote at great length of the evils of the dialectical materialists and crypto-fascists. See my post by that name.  You can always spot the would-be dictator by his victim-ology  rhetoric.  First he begins with a litany of real or imagined material inequalities and then proceeds to translate this into injustices on a legal, moral and social level. Having pre-positioned himself  as a victim ,usually claiming discrimination over race or religion, he then proceeds to defiantly call for an armed struggle to right all the wrongs he has discovered calling for all of “his people” to rally round him and disregard all existing laws and social norms and “rise up” and throw off the shackles of “the Jews” or whomever he has affixed the blame for his own condition on.  The wealthiest people around are the easiest targets; especially if they are a minority

The inequalities between regions have  often been caused by poor or unsustainable agricultural practices.  Environmental degradation, soil erosion, depletion of mineral content, and deforestation all cause farmland to become less productive. Until the 19th century and the advent of chemical fertilizers, farmland was simply used up then abandoned. Sometimes it became desert or just weedy scrub land that wouldn’t recover, no matter how long it lay fallow. Soil, devoid of  organic material from intensive farming of row crops, will harden and no longer absorb moisture from rainfall. Water will rush off the land instead of being absorbed and the fields will become gullied  and flash floods will devastate the area taking more and more of the top soil and creating a hard crust that perpetuates the cycle. The old practices of burning stubble and /or taking it off the fields for other uses exacerbates this problem and was one of  the causes of the great dust bowl http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dust_Bowl  in the South and mid west in the 1930s as well as countless other displacements of humanity over the centuries.  Depletion of elements such as nitrogen and potassium and trace elements such as boron, manganese, etc were much more common in the past. Areas with glaciated soils  contain all the essential trace elements in their diverse subsoil but areas with one type of bedrock and no glacial till are frequently deficient in one or more type of minerals or trace elements.  Calcium deficiency, for instance, would show up in the plants, animals and people of some regions causing stunted physical and mental development. Poor diets led to malnutrition and poverty. Poverty leads to ignorance which leads to ever worse agricultural practices as lands yield less and less every year.  Desperate populations  facing starvation and dislocation eye their neighbor’s land and soon a firebrand emerges with a simplistic explanation that “Them folks over the river stole whats rightfully yers and we gots to git it back”. Usually some willful distortion of history that pits one type of person against another and” bingo’”  the war is on. All this is directly related to the orthodox belief that the agricultural practices that worked before the soil became depleted will still work after it is depleted. Not only did these methods destroy the soil but are in no way going to restore it.

The introduction of chemical  fertilizer during the industrial revolution did a lot to stop this cycle. Land could be farmed more productively and sustainably creating more social, economic and political stability, most notably in Europe.  In the  Americas, land was more plentiful and many farmers wore out farm after farm moving ever westward and clearing more land as they went.  This caused the displacement of Native American tribes who were often dependent on hunting and gathering in the West. Most Indian tribes in the East and South were agrarian even before European settlers arrived and all the people of South America and Mexico were agrarian as well.  Their farming practices were unsustainable as well. They grew corn year after year on the same land and abandoned it to weeds when it was used up, clearing more forest with a “slash and burn” technique still used in third world countries. The wood ashes will release enough nutrients, like potassium, for a couple of years of good crops but then the fields will produce nothing.  When the population of Mexico was small the fields would grow back to forest and eventually the deep-rooted trees and native grasses would replenish the soil. When things got really bad a lot of human sacrifices helped reduce the number of mouths to feed.  There was always enough forest land available to clear and legal issues like fee simple ownership didn’t get in the way.  Now, with a population of 112 million, this method would not work.

This is where orthodoxy and logical fallacies caused so much suffering. I grew up in an agricultural community myself and lived on a farm. I knew that there were three numbers on a fertilizer bag  such as 20-20-20 or 60-0-0 always totaling 60 because the bags were 60 lbs.  apiece.   the first number was Nitrogen the second number was Phosphorus and the third number was Potash and each represented the number of pounds of each.   This was common knowledge like inoculating seed  or keeping grain dry so it wouldn’t catch fire in the granary. Everyone used chemical fertilizer and nothing was thought about it. Some farmers rotated their crops, some didn’t. Grain prices went up and down, even with a government-run wheat pool and price-fixing and government crop insurance schemes that actually paid farmers not to grow crops to prop up prices for those that did. All this Keynesian madness did nothing to prevent farmers from going bankrupt. High interest rates in the 70′s and record cold temperatures  broke more farmers than can be counted.  The world demand for grain was down as a global recession dragged on. High oil prices made transporting grain abroad unprofitable.  People in China were starving to death as grain rotted in Canadian fields.  Had the Chinese had a rational economic system they would have had money to buy the grain, and possibly grain of their own, but they wallowed in a Marxist quagmire of their own creation and starved for decade after decade, the meager produce of their, once mighty, society vacuumed up to support a  totalitarian government and a huge military. Marxist orthodoxy prevailing in the face of starvation, even death.

When chemical fertilizer was invented along with the field of organic chemistry, by a man named Liebig in Germany, he changed agriculture forever.  He discovered the essential role of nitrogen in the development of plants first then the five main elements that produce plant growth. Unfortunately for millions he became so fixated on the chemistry of plant growth that he downplayed the importance of organic material or humus in the soil. The new agriculture became an orthodoxy in its own right. He also formed a company that produced beef extracts. The product was named OXO and I used to drink a hot broth of it as a child. It was mostly salt. Liebig actually thought this would be used as a meat substitute. The new orthodoxy of adding simple compounds of nitrogen, phosphorus and Potash to soil and intensively farming it  worked better than the old method of adding nothing and was considered all you had to know to grow crops successfully forever. The complex process of life proved not to be so simple. With out organic material the soils became hard and cement like. Moisture could not penetrate. Soil devoid of organic material makes retention of moisture  difficult and thereby making use of the chemical fertilizer impossible. Soil erosion and acidity, buildup of unused nitrogen, pollution of groundwater, death of microorganisms and earthworms that are also essential to healthy living soil, fertilizer runoff contaminating streams as less and less of the fertilizer becomes available to the crops,toxic algae bloom in the watersheds i.e. the Gulf of Mexico,  reduced yields, unstable supply, unstable  markets, land that is no longer productive no longer repays bank loans or pays taxes to the county, dislocation of populations like the “Okies” of the dust bowl  30s. (See Steinbeck’s “Grapes of Wrath”.)  New scientific thinking had swept away centuries of hard-won lore. Re-use of animal manure, drainage, terracing, flood control, mulching, crop rotation and countless other hard learned lessons were swept away as “no  longer necessary” with the advent of powerful new farm equipment and chemical fertilizers.  The results were a disaster on a larger scale than ever.  The new orthodoxy of “science vs. folklore” was unsustainable as well. A balanced approach of adding missing minerals to soils that were deficient while retaining maximum humus content and healthy microorganisms and beneficial insects slowly began to merge the two schools of thought and now American and Canadian agriculture is some of the most productive in the history of earth. Cornfields in the mid-west that produced 10 bushels per acre in 1910 produce 100 now and do so year after year.  There are still problems but there is enough land under cultivation to feed the entire population. Barring an event like  the year without a summer, this should continue. Despite an endless procession of doom and gloom Malthusian  prophets the amount of food and quality of food per person has increased steadily in spite of population growth.  Malthus wrote his horrid misanthropic, narrow-minded, nonsense 100 years before Liebig and there have been ideology driven echoes ever since. Recycled versions of Malthus (who seems to have taken a page out of the book of Revelations) spring up annually. The 4 horsemen of global warming, global famine, global pandemic, and global war have spawned more best sellers than anything I can think of.

Still; new orthodox ideas emerge. “One note musicians”, as columnist John Savory would say, touting raw diets, vegan-ism, organic farming, locavores etc. all with a single idea in mind. Others, who are simply Statists of one variety or another, demand government seizure of all farmland or having all large agricultural corporations broken up by force of law and distributed to small, one family farms. These ideas were tried in several countries with predictably disastrous results. In Stalin’s Russia,  large landowners had their land seized and taken over by state co-ops while small farmers  were allowed to keep their land in a concept consistent with Marxist principles. These Kulaks ,as they were called, produced much more than the large farms run by the government. In the lean years after the revolution, marked by one war after another with every neighboring  country, these Kulaks were a godsend. They fed the country in a time of  crises. Once the wars ended however, the  Soviet government became alarmed at the lack of productivity on the kolkhoz or collective farms and condemned the Kulaks as “greedy capitalists”. The same farmers that had received the Red Star award for patriotism were now rounded up and sent to the Gulags for “crimes against the state”.  Workers on the kolkhoz were rounded up by the thousands also as “saboteurs and wreckers” and still the farms produced nothing and the people starved.  So state agriculture isn’t necessarily bad, it just hasn’t worked anywhere it’s been tried, other than in ancient times under autocratic rule. Even then, farmers may have been independent of the Pharaoh or King or the failure of the state agriculture may have brought down the kingdom for the reasons I have already stated. My point is this; in an evolving society with population growth and technological changes the best way for a farmer to adapt is to be independent of government or any other outside force. This includes financial institutions and religious orthodoxy.

The “organic” crusade, largely espoused by those on the progressive left, is another example of  orthodoxy without logic. These retrograde fools  would have you believe that farming with no fertilizers or chemicals of any kind is somehow “sustainable”  and “healthy”. This is obviously pure nonsense.  Simply adding crushed limestone to acidic soils is a violation of their mantra and while I get the concept of not burning out soil with endless nitrogen and no organic content and I understand the problems of constantly increasing pesticide use I would contend that with balanced soils and trace elements added to deficient soils most pesticides are unnecessary.  Most pests won’t attack healthy crops. When soils are lacking in even one essential mineral the crops will become vulnerable to pests and plant diseases like stem rust.  Because the orthodox “scientific” farmers of the Liebig school  eschewed common sense soil conservation techniques is no reason to go 180 degrees and farm like it was 1665.  If soil is deficient in manganese  or boron all the mulching and plowing in of organic material in the world won’t create that element if the straw or manure was produced from that soil in the first place. There simply isn’t any boron present and it has to be added to the soil or it won’t be productive, ever.  Wearing a Tilley hat and a pony tail and smoking weed won’t help either.

“Locavore” has become a new  buzzword for narrow-minded leftists in my area. Their logic is this; if food weren’t transported long distances it would save a ton of energy and stop the “global warming”.  Their answer; everybody eat local foods and the problem is solved.  There are a couple of problems with this. For instance all the citrus fruits in America are grown in Southern California, Texas and Florida. These citrus growing areas contain less than ten percent of the population.  Everyone in these areas would have to eat  a lot of limes and grapefruits and oranges and no one in Alaska or Ohio or Canada would get any.  People in Nebraska would be required to eat about 3 or 4 tons of corn per person a month and a lot of people in other countries would starve to death, but ;other than that, and a few thousand other items, it’s a great idea. Even in “liberal” Seattle where we have enough  agricultural diversity and fishing to keep it fairly interesting  these restaurants fail miserably. There’s just not enough ways to serve salmon and apples to keep people coming back.

This does not mean that these ideas are without merit they are just not exclusive of all other ideas. It is just that kind of thinking that caused Liebigs methods to fail in the long-term. His results were achieved in laboratories  under controlled conditions with no study of the effects on the soil, only on the reactions of the plants  of one generation. The mechanics of controlling water and keeping soils from blowing away start at the cellular level and are dependent on everything from topography to microbes to solar activity. Farming is far more complex than anyone ever imagined. There is no room for tunnel vision in any school of thought or enterprise.  In the end, the farmer with the right blend of mysticism, science, folklore, and innovation will end up owning his land and prospering and the rigid ideologue will abandon his worn out farm and get a job elsewhere but if every farmer in a nation is bound to the same methodology the first time “central control” makes a mistake the whole nation will flounder and starve and a war will begin.

Mandels first point is to divide value of production into “socially necessary” and “surplus” values. He starts at a primitive stage of society where hunter- gatherers   produce only what they need to live and consume it themselves. Everything else, he states, is “surplus”. At this point he shifts to an agrarian stage of development and introduces the concept of commodities.  His first illustration is an example of Portuguese slave colonies and their unjust division of labor segueing into European serfdom and its division of labor.  This , he states, is  emerging capitalism.  This is a purposeful distortion of history designed to make the reader equate modern business with slavery. Firstly a very small percentage of people throughout history were slaves. It would be impossible for a small minority of “idle rich” people to hold a large robust peasantry in slavery as they would simply revolt and kill them.  His characterization of the “ruling class” during serfdom is also purposefully oversimplified. It wasn’t just a  case of serfs producing “extra” so the lord of the manor could loaf around. Now, while I disdain the  concept of Kings and Lords and whatnot I am intelligent enough to know that Europe at the time was a collection of city states composed of a walled fortress, each, with enough agricultural land around it to feed the population.  Warfare between these city/states was almost perpetual with one group constantly vying with the other for territory and resources. The Lord of the city provided armed, trained men with state of the art weapons  and commanded them himself  or he was quickly ousted or killed. He ruled with an iron fist in a world of brute force. The idea that the simple peasants could have  lived “organic, pastoral lives” without this military presence is a laugh. The serfs too were called to serve in time of war. If a neighbor, or even worse, a foreign invader approached, all the farmers brought all their livestock and goods and families into the castle and helped man the walls. To pay for this castle and the professional soldiers  to defend it he gave up about half of his labor and produce.  Supplies of food were kept at the castle to guard against hunger and siege as well.  The ridiculous hypothesis put forth by Mandel and Marx that all they needed was a few community organizers and a new way of looking at wealth re-distribution is absurd. ROFL, as the kids say.  Read Ayton and Prices “Medieval  Military Revolution”. It will illustrate that the castles depended on the towns as much as the towns , and subsequently the agricultural lands surrounding them, depended on the castles. The towns had the craft workers, the markets, the law courts,  the mint and the churches, all of which were necessary for everyone.  These institutions, while maybe not to the modern socialists liking, were state of the art socially as well.  The churches provided  a moral underpinning to a society as they did in every country. The law courts provided some measure of redress of grievances (at least among social equals). These laws even crossed class lines as I Stated earlier ( See my post; What’s wrong with Kings?”).  The mint provided a uniform medium of exchange to “value” ones produce and labor. The craft workers such as skilled blacksmiths weavers and potters created useful items at not only lower prices but at higher quality. The Potter needed a kiln. The weavers needed looms and fulling vats. The blacksmith needed a forge. All of them needed coal to fire them and raw materials. It was not financially viable for each household to build all these items and master all these trades themselves while farming and mining their own minerals. Also the markets in the towns provided a place to sell their wool, and wood and grain etc.

So the division of labor that Mandel insists did not exist until the capitalists came along to “exploit  the working man” actually did exist organically.  He states, un-categorically, that it did not exist in the hunter gatherer society. This is also false. The women gathered while the men hunted. The children picked berries while the men stood guard.  Bears will eat berries but they will also eat children. This wasn’t because the men were “not “socially evolved enough” to let the women “actualize  themselves” or any other newspeak claptrap. It was because the men were larger and stronger and could fight off a cave bear with spears if necessary.  Some cavemen could chip flint into tools better than others. Some could throw a spear farther. Some could track better. The best tracker would lead the men to an animal. The less skilled would haze the animal in the direction of the best spearmen and they would  make a kill. The best butcher would cut  the animal up and the strongest men would carry the largest loads of meat home. The women would chew the hides and make the clothing while they stayed safe with the kids.

All this is very offensive to modern-day feminists and metro sexual, socialist college kids and PETA and all the other assorted assholes out there in La-La land but that doesn’t alter the facts one iota. The only way to survive was to eat the most concentrated food available and that meant digging up starchy roots, picking fruit when available and killing any animal that could be killed. It also meant the strong protecting the vulnerable and the able doing what the less able could not do. This is where division of labor comes from and why it will always be here.

Mandel insists that “artisans , artists, and scholars could not exist without surplus”.  Explain to me then the fascinating “cave art” that was discovered in France a few years ago. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lascaux Explain why some spearheads  were crafted so beautifully when they were only an instrument of death. Explain why bones were formed into flutes. These are only the durable items and one can only guess what was done  with dance, singing, storytelling, face painting, clothing etc.  Man has always had art in all its forms even in the face of death and starvation.  Click here to see inmate art from Auschwitz concentration camp. http://fcit.usf.edu/HOLOCAUST/resource/gallery/FWALL.htm#fwall11

Mandel himself was interned by the Nazis during WWII. This clearly shaped his thinking. In the 40′s the Democratic Socialists struggled with the Nationalist Socialists for the soul of Europe.  Both groups were misnamed. The Social Revolutionaries took control in Russia in 1922 and promptly took away all vestiges of democracy. The Nazis took control of Germany in 1933 and did the same thing. Both groups held elections  but there was only one party and generally one candidate. Also there were armed security agents at the polls making sure that you “voted correctly” or else. The “workers paradise” in the Soviet Union slid rapidly into a totalitarian nightmare as did the “Third Reich” of Hitler.  Mendel was interned in a work camp of industrial slave laborers at Dora during the war and went on to become a leading light of Socialism after the war.  This personal grudge he acquired during the war years is definitely fueling his writing.  He does nothing to explain how Marxist theory will work better than market economy. All his pseudo logic is simply  class warfare rhetoric combined with a bunch of re-definitions of terms to place the discussion in the hands of totalitarians. He fails to explain why Marxism fails everywhere it is tried and only makes an oblique reference or two to the Soviet system as “an economy in transition away from capitalism”.  So apparently anything wrong with the Soviet model of production is the fault of lingering capitalists that haven’t been purged yet. Well the Soviets started purging in the 1920s,  one industry, then another, then another, then racial groups then social groups then the military then the intelligentsia then the KGB itself was purged for failing to purge everyone properly and still the farms produced less and the mines produced less and the people went without shoes and without cars and without enough to eat. Ubiquitous labor unions that existed to negotiate with non-existent companies  flourished. Bureaucrats, regulators, inspectors and police informants made life hell on earth for everyone, including each other, while the only people toiling away in earnest were the millions locked away in the Gulags. They worked because they would not eat if they didn’t and to miss a day or two of food in a Siberian prison camp is to die.

Where is the utopia Mr. Mendel? Is it in Pol Pots Cambodia? Is it in Cuba? Is it in Angola? Hitler was a Socialist as well. How did that work out for you and your friends in the camps? And the specter he raises in his theories? “Alienation of the worker”. Astounding! I think I would rather be “alienated” all f@cking day than be chained to my “comrades” in a Siberian salt mine or starving to death in the midst of the richest farmland in Africa. But the real danger, he states,  lies in the inevitable “monopoly” that capitalism leads to. So instead he proposes a government monopoly. This is apparently O.K.

Now listen up Ernest. Dave Thomas, who founded Wendy’s, used to work at MacDonald’s. He left the golden arches and started his own fast food joint. His burgers are, in my opinion, far better. Given the choice between the two,  I will always eat there. That’s why monopolies don’t happen. Not because of government intervention but because people come up with better ideas. Bill Gates had a better idea. At one point he had a huge market share. Now it is declining. Henry Ford had the world by the ass with his new fangled “assembly line” thingy.  Now Toyota is kicking his ass. Carnegie with his new “blast furnace” was the steel mill king, world-wide.  On and on it goes. This boogey man of monopoly is nonsense in the real world.

Now the thread that holds Marx theories together is  his “labor value” concept. All value, he states, is labor value. It takes labor to produce the raw materials and labor to transport them etc. He will not concede that the materials have intrinsic value. Aluminium is made from Bauxite ore. It is mined in large quantity in South America. It is extracted in huge quantities with big mining machinery. It is transported in massive cargo ships in powder form that take a lot of capital to build.   It requires a massive amount of electricity to refine. the best way to do this is with a hydro dam.  Hydro dams are expensive to build but they are a huge source of clean renewable power. Such dams exist in British Columbia Canada and there is an aluminium smelter or two up on the north coast of B.C.  They are lucky enough to have a suitable river or two to dam up as well as the capital to do it otherwise there would be no Alcan smelter there. Simple peasants in Bolivia couldn’t produce aluminium in mom and pop refineries for “local markets”.  There is no local market for aluminium in  ingots in a local market in backwater Bolivia. The people couldn’t possibly generate enough power to smelt the ore.  Canada is resourceful enough to produce the electricity and Bolivia is fortunate enough to have the ore and wise enough to export it.

None of these things are “labor value”. The capital to build the mining equipment, the hydro dam, the ocean vessels. the docks etc. all came from venture capital raised from mostly individual investors via the stock market. All this Marxist claptrap about falling wages and overproduction and suppressing competition  is just  more proof that supply side economics is reality. More supply leads to lower prices. Greater availability gives more consumer choice. Readily available capital levels the playing field for anyone with a new, good idea.  Government monopolies are unbreakable and government controlled economies always fall behind their overseas competitors. Innovation is crushed under Marxist rule and compliance with rigid government doctrine is mandatory. Enforcement of economic decisions made by political hacks always leads to crushing oppression. Items like gold have intrinsic value, whether you like it or not.  The miner will only get paid to mine it once but it will always have value no matter how many times it changes hands.

But isn’t a doctor just as important as a lawyer?  Yes; it can be, depending on your circumstances. The man dying of cancer isn’t concerned about alimony or parking tickets and the man facing a life sentence isn’t worried about his acne or his sore toe. The real difference is that the laws you are subject to are created out of thin air by your government and are subject to change at any time without notice.

The circumstances of your health are more under your control.  It’s not the government that that makes you sick.  It’s the crack you smoked, the pork fat you ate, the gallons of booze you drank, the thousands of hours you sat on the sofa instead of doing something active. Only the government can pass a law and then arrest you and put you on trial. Therefor they must pass just laws that protect the rights of others and give you due process before they punish you.

Now some illnesses are not self inflicted. A small child can get cancer. A non-smoker can get lung cancer. A top athlete can have a heart attack. This does not affect the governments role in providing you with a doctor.  The “fairness” of your illness or “unfairness” is not a legal argument. The fairness of your arrest is totally in the hands of the government. Illnesses can just happen. Laws don’t just happen like the weather. They are a power of the government and that “public pretender” is your only protection against tyranny. It assumes that all lawyers are created equally while in truth we know that they are not. This is also “unfair” on some level but you should have thought about that before you robbed that liquor store (allegedly).

Now if you are looking for “fairness” in medical treatment, look no further than the legal system. That same government that provides you with a, bottom of the barrel, can’t get a job anywhere else, attorney will now be providing your doctor.  Those same geniuses that run the DMV and the post office will “manage” your healthcare. Now you can piss and moan all you want about healthcare providers and insurance companies but I don’t recall the government being so warm and fuzzy when they booked me into the jail or brought me up in front of a judge.  In fact I don’t ever recall any interaction I have ever had with government being “fun”.  The INS? Not a barrel of laughs. Border Patrol and Customs enforcement? Not a bunch of swell guys when it came my turn to be “questioned, detained and searched” at the border. The police, when they were called to deal with me? Not so much.  How about waiting at the post office on Dec 15th with an armload of packages. There were 5 windows but curiously only one was open. The line was all the way out the door. After waiting for an hour or two I asked the one, fat, lazy, stupid, bitch that was “working” there  ”Why do you only have one window open when everyone is trying to send their Christmas parcels?” She looked at me all cross eyed and said “Everybody is on vacation for the Holidays!” Pure genius. “Can’t you hire some temporary help, just for the season?” I asked  naively.  ”No!” she croaked insanely(her rotten, crooked, brown teeth flashing) “The union would never allow it!”  Enough said.

The constitution is only there to protect you from the government.  It’s not there to protect you  from gallstones or hailstones or getting stoned. All that is up to you. It’s called freedom. Well sometimes freedom sucks. But I wouldn’t trade it for tyranny no matter how benevolent.

Here is an interesting exchange I saw on T.V. today.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1-eBz8hyoE&feature=popular

The constitution is what keeps your civil rights alive. The first ten amendments or “Bill of rights” to be more exact. http://www.earlyamerica.com/earlyamerica/freedom/bill/text.htmlYou will notice that none of these rights cost any money.  Free speech is actually free. Gun ownership is also free but guns themselves aren’t. An important distinction.  Lawyers are not free either, but you do have the right to one if you are  arrested, which is why they have to give you a public defender if you have no money.  So while your right is free( to you) it costs the government, and thusly the taxpayer, money to provide the legal counsel you are entitled to. This is an externality. Your right costs me money. However since the government has the right to lock you up for any law they see fit to pass I don’t mind paying in this case since the alternative is so much worse.

Now so called “progressives” think that free speech should be curtailed if it is “offensive” or “dangerous”. This is the argument. If your free speech causes me grief of some kind that creates an externality for me  thereby violating my rights.  This gives me a “right” to curtail your speech. A right that supersedes your right to speak. Also I get to decide what is hateful or dangerous from my point of view. Your point of view doesn’t matter because you are a “hater”  and therefor have no rights. Whats “offensive” or “hateful” you ask? I’ll decide as I go along.

This is clearly what the framers of the constitution  sought to avoid. The power to regulate media is specifically mentioned. The one entity that is curtailed from  suppressing  free speech is the Federal government. Constitutional rights only bar the government from passing laws against free speech. They don’t stop me from disagreeing with you or bar you from disagreeing with me. If I walk into the bosses office and tell him to “go fuck himself” he is free to react any way he wants. If he fires me I can’t use the first amendment to sue him because it only applies to the government. If he punches me in the mouth I can sue him because he broke the law. Just because you don’t like what I say doesn’t give you immunity from other unrelated laws. But it won’t get my job back. I don’t have the right to a job.

So rights that create externalities create responsibilities to the holder of the rights.  If I have a pulp mill and I have a right to make pulp. I also have a responsibility to not dump toxins in the river. My employees don’t have a right to work for me, but as long as they do (employment is a mutual agreement) I have a responsibility for their well being and safety.  I can’t ask someone to do something that I know could harm him or others. These are the real workers rights. Not “living wages” and lush pensions and break rooms with prayer rugs and trans-gender bathrooms etc.  Those are wants. If you don’t like showing your tits in the mens locker room and the girls don’t want to look at your penis in their locker room you have a problem. You should probably have thought of this before you paid all that money for the surgery. You are not entitled to this pulp mill job. You do have the right to become  trans-gender. That’s your business and I applaud you for being who you want to be. It does not affect the business of my pulp mill however. You created your situation and do not have the right to re-arrange the world to suit your chosen condition.

If you exercise the right to buy and possess a firearm you now have a responsibility to not shoot anybody by accident. You can purposely shoot someone but only if they are threatening your life.  If you break into my house in the middle of the night and say “Give me some money or I’ll kill you” I have a reasonable expectation ,at that point, that you are a danger and can fire at you. I cannot fire at the guy walking down the sidewalk on a presumption that he might rob me someday and kill him just to make sure that he doesn’t. Both these things happen in America every day

Fascists in the government like to invent rights for people and then set themselves up as the champion of these made up rights. “Every body has the right to free ice cream on Friday” says the fascist.  ”Yaaaaay” say all the dummies. “We want free ice cream.  Lets vote for the guy who is protecting our rights.”  Well you don’t have the right to free ice cream. Neither do I. You have the right to buy your own goddamn ice cream. You have the responsibility not to eat ice cream until you’re so fat that you die from a heart attack.  And if you do it’s not my problem. Government “wellness plans” coupled with “free” health insurance are just more infringements on your choices and mine and we all have to pay for the “free stuff”.  Fascists  use these bait and switch tactics over and over. Free food for the poor. Then we raise the beer and cigarette taxes to pay for it. Then the poor sell their food stamps in the bar and buy some smokes and beer with the money. Ten bucks for a pack of smokes that should cost maybe two bucks. Outrageous prices for a six pack. All to pay for State medical costs. Trying to “discourage”  alcohol use and “fix” healthcare. Doesn’t do shit. People still drink like fish then go to the government for a free liver transplant.  Just endlessly expanding Rube Goldberg machines, incrementally taking away peoples choices in the name of protecting them from the natural consequences of said choices.  Taxes never stopped anybody from smoking, drinking, doing dope, or hiring or becoming a hooker. social engineering is stupid.

So I support gay marriage. Not on moral grounds because my morality doesn’t enter into your actions. I just don’t want the government telling anyone whom they can marry. I also support legalization of pot. Smoke your brains out, just not in my car. I don’t like the smell. Stink up your own car.

Here it is in a nutshell. You end where I begin and vice versa. Your freedom to be you includes my freedom to be free from you.

I heard a piece on the news today; Horses in Central Park used to pull Hansom cabs or carriages will be given 2 weeks vacation every year. Only problem is they can’t tell us where they want to go.   Animal rights groups have been protesting the horse drawn taxis for decades. Only Mr. Ed could do it (as well as a pretty good Johnny Cash imitation) but he’s not here to translate any more.

I’ve noticed a lot of lesbian dog walkers lately. Really butch, shaved head, combat boots etc. Not just the usual dykes on bikes. They only seem happy when they are pulling a big dog around on a leash. The rest of the time they are really angry and it’s your fault.

The volcano in Iceland has been erupting for two days now and there is a crisis on the left. No one has figured out a way to blame it on George Bush yet.  Also global warming will be setback decades by the ash fallout. Another blow to Gore et-al.

General Electric filed 7,000 tax returns in hundreds of different countries. They made over ten billion in profits worldwide. They lost 408 million in the U.S.A and thusly paid not one cent of taxes.  CEO Jeff Immelt still sits on Obama’s economic advisory board and I can see why. Liberals like to call for higher taxes on “rich” people like me but aren’t too eager to pay them themselves.  I wonder what the all white crowd at MSNBC would say if this was Halliburton? Oh wait, I forgot, they(MicroSoft No Black Commentators) are a wholly owned subsidiary of G.E.  What a coincidence.  A non-taxpaying, massive bailout receiving, corporation, that owns an all white television station, that pimps for Obama with every breath and attacks anyone who speaks against “The One”. And they do more no-bid contracts than any company in the world by about 9 times.  Wheres your outrage Mr. Olbermann? Resign Sir!!!

37 new Black candidates are running for Congress in the midterm elections. All are staunchly conservative and endorsed by the TEA party movement. That’s a pretty sneaky way to hide their racism isn’t it.  I know, we’ll campaign for black candidates and then vote for them and nobody will know we’re in the KKK.  Yeah, thats how we’ll secretly push our racist agenda.  And then we’ll tell them all to do really racist stuff after they get elected like not spend the country into oblivion at 100 miles an hour. Yeah.

Congressman Hank  Johnson (D) thinks we shouldn’t send more Marines to Guam because it might flip over and capsize?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fuoTI3xxDzo&feature=related

He sure is smart. A lot smarter than that stupid Sarah Palin. She thinks oil comes from “oil wells” and that we can just drill them. What a retard. She wanted to send more troops to Afghanistan to try and “Win the war”. Only an idiot would do that. She doesn’t even have the foreign policy experience to know that Guam floats and is likely to tip over if troops are deployed all on one side. Lucky for us we have Ole Hank here to prevent that disaster. That would be like a giant Poseidon adventure (without Shelley Winters or Maureen McGovern singing “There’s got to be a morning after”).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JxRHa4ghD18&feature=related

Chow fer now!!!

This being said I will go through the de-rigeur disclaimers  about “racist talk” and “political correctness” etc. It was Democrats who coined the term “nigger”. It has now become the sole province of African-Americans. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=esyNH-sdmIY&feature=related.It was Democrats who owned slaves in the United States. Some of these slave owners were “free blacks”, even former slaves themselves. No whites were enslaved but many people of mixed race were. If a man is half black and half white were they only enslaving his black half? You would have to ask a Democrat about that. Only they have the pretzel logic that enables them to enslave people based on their skin color and then claim that it is some form of “social justice”.  These Democrats would even engage in forced sexual relations with enslaved women and to compound the crime would “sell” their own offspring to other Democrats. This was back when they were the “Party of the White man” before they became “The party of the Black man”.

So the party of slavery and the KKK is still at work on their racial agenda. Only now they have a new concept. Redistribution of wealth. This entails one person working at his job,say; picking cotton, and then turning the money over to some rich white Democrats to “redistribute” to the less fortunate. People who oppose this plan are demonized as “greedy,corporate, Republicans”. So if Billy the carpenter or Joe the barber earns 50 to 100 thousand a year, a certain percentage of this money is “owed” to the greater good. This percentage increases incrementally every year. One day (soon) it will be all of it. Billionaire crypto-fascists in congress like Nancy Pelosi and John Heinz/Kerry are still running the show and holding the money. This is reminiscent of the old slavery where one skin color picked cotton and hoed corn so rich white Democrats could control everything and live in the lap of luxury at the workers expense. Only now, it is “morally superior” to the concept of doing your own work for your own money.  Now; if you object they call you names and criminalize you for speaking out. Threatening censorship and racial class warfare at every turn of the road. The “white right” the “Christian right” the “greedy capitalists” and other pejoratives pepper their speech. Everything is based on race. If you are the “wrong color” you better not get uppity or you will be arrested, intimidated,demonized or attacked physically. And the biggest crime of all is to be Black and not “go along”. Then you will be called a Nigger by everyone on the left.

So if those who work are evil and those who do not work are entitled to the wealth produced by them, who is the slave? If one person has a “right” to that which is produced by another like food, housing , money, health insurance etc where is the obligation of the recipient? Is he required to give thanks to the taxpayer who feeds and clothes him and pays for his medical treatments? No. If the producer/taxpayer has no right to the wealth he has produced only an obligation to hand it over to the  government for redistribution where are his rights? As well, he is increasingly vilified to justify taking ever more of his income to support the ever-growing dependent class as more and more people see the futility of working to support the collective.  At what point does he cease to own himself. If he were a company and shareholders took over 51% of his produce they would have majority control.  So when you are paying more than 50% of what you earn to the collective you are officially a slave. Even those in the cotton fields had some time after work to  raise their own chickens and fix up their own miserable shacks and take care of their families.  As it is I pay over a third of what I make in various forms of taxation. With the Federal takeover of the mortgage industry and health insurance industry I would argue that half or more of your money is ending up in government coffers in many cases. If you live in New York City for instance you are definitely a slave. Here in WA. State we are perilously close.  Who will emancipate us? Will the Republicans free us again like they did under Lincoln? Not likely. I see no Honest Abe coming over the horizon.  They will “compromise” with the party of slavery and cave in one piece at a time until I am a slave in a red shirt instead of a slave in a blue shirt.  They will “go along” while the Democrats seize my 401K and your IRA and nationalize them into the bankrupt Social Security system. They will “compromise” when the VAT tax comes and get it reduced by 1 or 2 percent.  Phony conservatives like Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney will posture and then make deals with the slavers and in the end we will all be sold “down the river”.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c2xrylOu_9A&feature=fvw

My game however will be different. In Obamanopoly there will be no banker. There will be one player who is called “The One”. He will run the game and make up the rules as he goes along. There will be a set of written rules that everyone will promise to follow by swearing on a Bible at the start of the game but “The One” can disregard or  re-interpret these rules any time he wants.  Anyone who argues with “The One” about the rules will be handed a “race card” which he must wear stuck to his forehead for the rest of the game. After receiving 3 or more race cards you will be kicked out of the game and all your money seized by The One.

Instead of a banker we will have a guy called “The Gummint”. This player will have about 56 different hats with different things written on them. He will be the equivalent of 56 players and will always do the bidding of The One in different capacities, depending on what hat he wants to put on.

There will be all the other players at the table with their piece on the game board rolling the dice and going around the circle, trying to make some money and buy some property. These people will be called “greedy Capitalists” by The One and others.

There will be another group that sits on the couch and doesn’t play or even watch the game. They will have all their smokes and snacks and beers paid for with real money by the greedy Capitalists. At the end of the game the greedy Capitalists will clean up their mess too. They will also apologize to these people for having a job and money on a regular basis. These “community organizers” as they are called will serve no function in the game but can and will hand out race cards indiscriminately. Other than that they will be given half of the money of the other players on the last Wednesday of every month.

Play will commence with each player purchasing a cheap plastic game piece and dice from a guy in another room called “China”. China will lend this money to Gummint  to distribute to the community organizers. These game pieces will look like a little oil derrick or a car or a stethoscope or whatever the player wants to represent.

There will also be an empty chair at the table. This place will be called “the status quo” by The One and the  gummint. The community organizers would also use this term but are not capable of  such articulation. They only know three sentences.

1. America sucks.

2. Kill whitey.

3. Communism is good. ( but don’t you dare call me a Communist!)

The One will choose a player to occupy this “status quo ” seat from time to time. This person will be spat upon and reviled by others at the behest of The One. Players who choose a little T.V. or a newspaper for a game piece usually jump in here.

Now every 4 times around the board The One will have to stand for re-election. At this point the community organizers will get to vote along with the people who actually play the game. The T.V,. and newspaper players will fiercely defend The One and the greedy Capitalists will take turns getting avalanches of race cards.  Simply disagreeing with The One is enough to get you kicked out so you have to be careful here.

After the election The One will step into the other room and have a quiet conversation with China and come back with a basket full of goodies that he borrowed the money to buy. Malt liquor, Bak-n-ettes, packs of Newports, that sort of thing.  These will be handed out to the community organizers and others that voted for him. The greedy Capitalists  that oppose this “progress” will be fined for their temerity. Good thing too. At this point “Gummint” is running out of money and is unable to print more. The One would like to bring the game to an end by taking all the money from the greedy Capitalists (unless they are named Kennedy,Heinz-Kerry, Pelosi et al)   but realizes that ending the game ends his status as The One. So instead he just chooses another player to occupy the status quo seat and starts demonizing him.

Sound like fun? Wanna Play?

Inductive reasoning is somewhat different. If I touch a piece of steel after cutting it with a torch, I burn my hand. If I repeat this 20 or 30 times (duh) I form a hypothesis. The steel is too hot to pick up bare handed after torch cutting.  This seems easy but it gets more complicated quickly.

Now both of theses processes are attempts to predict the future. Neither one is foolproof. There are more variables possible in any situation than meet the eye at first.  I used to say that “no matter what the sun will rise tomorrow”. That was before I went to the high arctic in winter. I used to say that “all crows are black” until I went to Africa. They are black with a white bib there. A person native to either of these areas would have no such preconceptions. In fact an Inuit  might be startled to see a sunrise on December 21st and an African might be surprised to see an all-black American crow.

This is the reasoners frame of reference at work and it is a bigger variable than the material facts most of the time.  Most people operate inside the sphere of their own experience colored by that which they were taught before they were old enough to reason for themselves. The accepted truths that we are given as children slant all of our thoughts for better or for worse. A parent will knowingly and or unknowingly impart all of his belief systems to his or her children in some form. For example, a child raised in a religious home will not always adopt the religion for himself but his value system will still be influenced by the teachings he receives.

When two individuals have a shared experience they also will view it differently. I might have a good time shooting at someone who is trying to carjack me. Others might find this stressful, even unpleasant. Go figger. Some people go back to prison after being released saying that they could no longer cope with the outside world. They are institutionalized. Their experiences have made them unfit for non-prison life.  Others commit suicide to avoid going back

These are subjective views of what can only be described as hard reality. I come from northern Canada. I find the climate in Seattle to be warm and almost tropical. My wife grew up in southern California. She thinks this is the arctic. Ezra Pound commented to Ernest Hemingway  on the use of adjectives when writing. Avoid them, he basically said, because they mean something different to everyone. So if you wrote “it was a bitterly cold day” that would mean 40 below to me. It would mean 40 above to her.

Now all these things are necessary for critical thinking to be possible. One must have experience to think critically but must not personalize that experience overly in order not to jaundice their thinking. Think of a woman who dates a golfer. He golfs obsessively and pays little attention to her and they eventually break up. Afterward she asks all prospective boyfriends if they golf and states that she does not date golfers. This is like saying “I read a book. It was boring. Therefore all books are boring” Well that book may have been a road atlas or a first aid manual. That doesn’t mean’”Tale of two cities” is a shitty book. Now, this woman doesn’t date guys with red hair or guys who drive sedans or left-handed guys or guys named Greg either. Especially if they play golf. She would probably be better off to just look for a guy that likes things that she likes, like movies or dinner dates or whatever. The golfer may have been obsessive or self-absorbed or whatever or he may have just not been that interested in her to start with. This is weak inductive reasoning. It’s like saying “my mom’s house is blue. All houses are blue.” This is clearly not critical thinking yet ,I hear these kind of statements from people all the time

Taking another persons hypothesis and measuring it against your own experience is one way to think critically. Taking credible facts into account and factoring in every variable as well as listening to the sources used by the person making the hypothesis. Using a” think through” process to gauge the relevance of the information. Anecdotal evidence should always be dismissed. No one with a sound argument would resort to anecdotal “snapshot” arguments. Use of pathos and demagoguery is also an indicator of a lack of soundness. Emotional arguments are the last resort of the manipulator.

This brings out another element that most people understand instinctively. That of motive. What is the motive of the person making the hypothesis or argument? Are they claiming to be “seeking the truth” or “doing the right thing”. If so review their actions since you have known them and decide if they are generally motivated by altruism or if they are mostly ,like most people, self-seeking on some level. If a person is mostly selfish and manipulative and is asking you for a hundred dollars to “save the children” all of a sudden he’s probably lying and trying to rip you off. You don’t need to prove it. Just donate the hundred to a real charity if you want. Or buy something you want instead. After all it’s your money.

Now I am going to refer back to this post in future posts to de-construct or verify the arguments made by others in the media and the people that they write about.  You will find that applying truly critical thinking to that which is often the accepted truths told by politicians and media pundits is shockingly revealing. Sometimes revealing the speech and sometimes the speaker.

I also believe in certain  spiritual principles that defy material logic. I believe in a creator. Materialists do not. In fact when you mention a creator to a materialist they get viscerally angry. The thought that there might be anything in this world beyond their understanding or control makes them livid.  I, on the other hand, feel that,a trace of humility being essential to ones well-being ,  a relationship with a benevolent higher power is philosophically and psychologically  necessary.  Billions agree with me. They have for millenia.  Many of the greatest minds in history have been spiritualists. Materialists dismiss them with a sneer.

I believe in a set of moral principles which are set forth by the creator.  One of these is individual rights. This is in diametric opposition to group or class rights.  The two cannot exist in the same moral plane.  Materialists always claim to be the champion of the individual  but turn around and cry class warfare at every opportunity and call for the advancement of  the state as the instrument of  redistribution.  This brings out the definition of government as a system of force.  This use of force in the form of taxation, military action, police, and or legal action is what robs the individual of his reaction choices.  The materialist calls for action when any identifiable group, either racial, gender, or whatever demographic can be perceived as victims of circumstance and carved out as a voting bloc. This is shallow opportunism at it’s worst masquerading as compassion. The result of this pandering and vote-buying is two-fold. A fostering of dependence and a sense of entitlement fueled by a culture of grievance mongering all based on comparative materialism and a further empowerment of the state mechanism that inches ever toward totalitarianism. There is also a balkanization of the society toward a group of “haves” and the “have-not-as-muches” in a three-cornered fight with the political class that sips champagne on private jets at taxpayers expense while publicly railing against the “corporations, dude”. All the while running the whole nation into disastrous debt to finance their cronies and line their own pockets.

I, on the other hand have faith. I believe people, if given the choice, will ultimately do what is best for themselves. Faith is not quantified monetarily. It is ethereal. It is a spiritual value and therefor priceless. So is happiness. If I spent all my time looking at Al Gores 150 foot yacht and being eaten up with envy I would be unhappy. What do I care if he and John Kerry and John McCain have hundreds of millions of dollars. It doesn’t make me poorer. I am more concerned with doing the right thing in my life. If I chose the path of comparative materialism I would be bitching constantly  about what the multi-millionaire has that I don’t have. Now you understand, what drives the materialist  is not a lack of wealth but a lack of faith and thusly a lack of contentment.  It is like a small child  pointing at another’s toys or ice cream crying shrilly” look what he got. ”

So we, the spiritualists, believe in freedom, have faith in the creator and our fellow-man, and are not afraid to take responsibility for our own lives and destinies. We do not demand written guarantees from our government or our labor union that map out our entire lives and promise that we will have as many material possessions as the guy next to us because we realize that it cannot be done. Look at where you are in your life. Think back 10 or 15 years and remember what you thought you would be doing.  Do the two line up? Probably not and they probably never will. Let’s face it. You’re not in control of the future.

Now the third-party here is the political class. They are in the business of getting elected. Accruing power is a dirty business on a lot of levels. Each politician strives for greater influence in his party, on his committee and ultimately in the nation. Do they care if the rules are changed once they are in the game? Not at all. If changing the rules gets them ahead they are all for it.  If exerting greater control on society by passing new laws gives them greater authority they are quick to do it.  All they need is an excuse. The materialist whiners of the world are suddenly of great importance to the crypto-fascist. Useful idiots to be held up as the victim du jour. They will be discarded as soon as they are no longer useful.  The short life span of “the cause” is dictated by the media. But the law remains on the books forever. They trot out little Billy on a T.V. show for five minutes. Little Billy has cancer. This means we are going to restructure our entire economy placing a large part of it under government control. Certain chosen corporations will be given exclusive control of large parts of the medical industry. Huge bureaucracies will be created. Hundreds of billions in taxes will be levied. You will now be required to pay 1,000 to 1,500 dollars a month to a corporation of their choice for a product you may not want.  If you resist you will be fined, even jailed. If you argue against this draconian bill they will rail in the press. “What are you, a racist?  Didn’t you see little Billy’s skin color? Don’t you know his Mom is a single mother? Don’t you know he comes from an under-served neighborhood? You are a greedy, racist ,capitalist! Imagine the nerve of these assholes. Accusing me of materialism. Fascists calling me a corporatist. Saying the most outrageous racist things and then throwing the word around like it was a club to be wielded by them only. Demanding massive state control of everything in the name of liberty and civil rights. Logic turned so completely upside down as to be no longer recognizable as logic anymore. Endless childish pathos masquerading as empathy for the individual. All aimed at subverting individual freedom. Did the housing projects turn the ghettos of America into a paradise? Did the welfare system make the single Moms life terrific? Is Social Security going to make me comfortable in my old age? These were all promised to me as they took thousands of dollars out of my paychecks year after year. Why would I believe them now? What I do believe is that if they are not stopped we will be living under what most of the world lives under. Totalitarianism.