Few Realists in Understanding Reganomics

President Ronald Reagan's economy benefited from mass deficit spending with concurrent tax cuts. That freed a lot of cash and loans for economic stimulus and it worked-the jobless rate dropped from the high of the last Carter year. Ronald Reagan of course advocated just tax cuts, yet that wasn't the economy he had. The vast military build up and Star Wars developments, the 500 ship navy were paid for with public debt. During the Reagan presidency the public debt of the U.S.A. reached about 5.3 trillion dollars if I recollect that accurately.

For the nearing 17 trillion dollar U.S. public debt to be reduced a federal budget surplus is requisite to pay the 3/4's trillion dollars of annual interest on the debt plus more to pay it down. That would require economic management competence rather than fantasy or delusion as both Republicans and Democrats prefer. Tax increases and budget cutting are needed. Yet more vital is budget reform where intelligent legislators (I am not joking) get more bang for the buck; they provide better services to the public at less cost.

The U.S. Government should not create many new federal programs that increase the number of government employees and while the private sector is not doing so well. U.S. manufacturing has decreased significantly during the Obama administration. Neither should a revitalization of the private sector fail to regard the environment and its conservation and restoration as priority number one. Politicians cannot afford to be ignorant children on the topic if a long-range eco-health is to have a chance of existing as science now understands it.

Most Guns Crimes are Consequent to Poverty, High Unemployment

Ending poverty in the U.S.A. is the best way to reduce gun crimes. Lasting poverty and ghetto strife as well as drug sales and consumerism create violence. Gentrified neighborhoods just don't have as much violence as those that are poor.

 The prosperous of course would rather repress the poor and take away their gun rights rather than increase taxes on themselves while cutting and reforming spending to create a full-employment nation where few have any interest in giving up the jacuzzi and gold course for inner urban strife and gang violence.

 The mass-media gangland is of a different sort than that of the poor. The prosperous do not have as much inter-personal violent crimes; instead they manage foreign wars where thousands and thousands of foreigners perish in dubious conflicts for complex reasons.

Most Americans Arrived Legally-Strengthen Border Security Not Illegal Entry

Creating a fast track for law-breakers is wrong. Illegal aliens ought not be given an advantage over those that arrived here legally as did most U.S. citizens and their ancestors including slave any more than should burglars be given an economic advantage and amnesty over those that have struggled legally through unemployment and poverty

 If laws are to mean anything they must be consistent and plain. Lawbreakers that increase their numbers sufficiently should not find a government receptive to giving they're law-breaking a legal status. That is a process of revolution instead of solid legal change. If a government that is weak and inconsistent does flip-flop on the application of the law temporarily it does create a legacy of disrespect for legal philosophy and integrity with lasting ill effects to the well being of a nation of laws with moral validity.

 Mexican citizens illegally residing in the United States should return to Mexico and apply through normal immigration channels to become permanent residents. Reason would indicate that their familiarity with the United States from having lived here should be acknowledged and given the value of perhaps half of the residency requirements for applying for U.S. citizenship should they happen to develop that circumstance. Reason would also indicate that former illegal aliens should need to live in the U.S.A. for some years after arriving legally to prove up their willingness to play by the rules and not just cut to the head of the line. A wise-guy beginning may be good enough for the Jersey mob of yore, yet it is not an adequate start in the life of millions of new American citizens.

The rich and middle class may prefer a cheap new mass labor force to prop up their concentration of wealth. The interests of the poor of the United States and of the unemployed to not coincide with those that would dump millions of new low income laborers in the nation. Dumping millions of dual citizenship new citizens would be a permanent disadvantage to millions of Americans. No illegal alien deal, if one is made by the decadent legislative class, should fail to require the forfeiture of Mexican citizenship of those seeking to take on U.S. citizenship.

Free Advice to Rush Limbaugh on How to Restore Conservative Momentum

In the wake of the Obama inauguration you may ask yourself; what is a conservative to do? Herein I will provide several ideas on the rationale of Presidential elections since 1980. Thus you may discover things about your own beliefs, and that of the national electorate that you may not have known.

One-Ronald Reagan was elected for his populist ideas rather than conservative ideas. 

The conservative ideas of Ronald Reagan, without Ronald Reagan are dead. Carter was elected after the last intelligent political operator President Richard Nixon took the fall over Watergate, because of his populist symbology. He could have a beer behind the gas station in a field jacket with brother Billy and the nation felt at peace. For a new conservative to be elected President he must be popular rather than a technocrat.

Gorge H.W. Bush was elected on Reagan's coattails and didn't serve a second term. Bill Clinton seemed a populist the nation might like-especially the ladies and homosexuals, and that was that. George Bush the Younger was barely elected with the intervention of the supreme court only because he ran against Pinnochio and the blow jobs of Bill Clinton's administration put a stain on the democrat oval office. Then the 9-11 job happened providing G.W. Bush a second term or he would have been cast out-though he ran against the uncharismatic John Kerry who said he was a war criminal along with his Vietnam vet peers.

President Obama is a mouthpiece for the liberal elite (as they regard themselves). He is a stuffed suit withuot dangerous original ideas that could upset the rich. Malcom X might have though of President Obama as a y.n. who mollifies the uninformed while channeling the money off to the rich. Under President Obama wealth continues to be concentrated while the bread and circuses charged on the federal credit card continues to throw trillions of debt on to to deficit pile no one intends to repay.

Americans vote populist if they have any reasonable choice. They want to elect the one that promises prosperity for all (well, President Obama seems to exclude the poor and accentuate the middle class), not the scrooge promising cuts. A balanced budget and deficit reduction is part of prosperity yet it must be carefully marketed to the voters. No plain conservative with nostalgia for King George III, Louis the XVI and Attaboy Attilla would find it easy to be elected to the Presidency on an agenda of trickle down from bankers, Wall Street elites and globalists of all sorts buying the U.S.Government.

The Conservative movement hasn't much of a political base economically speaking. The rich comprise at most 5% of the voters. For conservativism to develop a winning edge in 2014 and beyond it cannot schism itself with moderate and liberal Republicans for a divided Republican party is a minority. When conservatives say my way or the highway they serve to elect extreme liberal democrats.

American voters desire prosperity for-themselves and a President that really supports that. They want a good environment in recovery and full employment. They do not want Canadian tar sands oil through a pipeline and national groundwater pollution with undeclared chemicals used in fracking. The public is more intelligent than conservative talk radio hosts on occasion in believing scientific opinion on global warming issues as well as a number of other environmental issues. Republican and Tea Party Conservatism tends to run toward short-term dirty profits and an obsession about tax cuts for the privileged.

President Obama talks disingenuously about working in a bi-partisan manner and has chastised Republicans for not doing so. The President however should cut the federal budget 25% straitaway and create a health care infrastructure for the poor with walk in service at no cost through an expanded V.A. hospital system and take them out of Obamacare. Means tests should be applied to all social entitlement programs so the prosperous do not soak up money they don't need. The President has much to do himself to move toward  bi-partisanship and hasn't the slightest intent of doing so. The national economy suffers, the unemployed remain unemployed even approaching a retirement age they can't afford to retire in.

Republicans need that popular individual to run for office,with whatever Westinghouse appliances and such a conservative needs, along with donated political theory, to overcome the challenges of the day.

Hope Rises That Human Surrogate Can Birth Neanderthal

A Harvard geneticist has mentioned to a German newspaper that a surrogate could give birth to a Neanderthal after sufficient recombinant tinkering I guess. That brings hope for avoiding concussions in NFL games as Neanderthals had thicker skulls than people today.

Modern Neanderthals might disdain guns and just go right at it with assault clubs for home defense just for the heck of it.

http://www.slashgear.com/harvard-geneticist-says-a-neanderthal-baby-can-be-cloned-with-the-aid-of-an-adventurous-woman-21266162/

Evidently the genome of Neanderthals might be reconstructed and put into human stem cells. One new that research would have real benefits one day.

The Logic of Political Evolution's Two-Degree Dialectic (poetry)

Structural traces remain in words like froth

on the rim of opportunities lost

when the city built over the green land

of wilderness packaged literal shadows

of tomorrow's yin yang ideas

fought in the war over political prisoners

contesting methods for delivering more product

resources consumable and with disposable debt

given cardboard hamburger filler yet

When the dialectic of political evolution ignores

358 degrees of other directions

when observation sentences are supplanted

propositions of historical theories stitched together

abstractions of loyal percentages

specialists arguing for truth-values in language

might have known if the light had been better

if empty continents without electronics

had the same political philosophy of right

as Venn diagrams of Eurasian states

alliances of social class kaleidoscopes

viewed objectively in existentialist percepts

rushed without adequate political philosophy

with declining resources, independence and truth

without moderating toward process utopia arranged like apparitions of hope and change

With the guidance of Christ to endure

through the secular,

through rampant decay

a shining smoldering ruined civilization on a hill

transformed mass conformity

into egalitarianism of ashes

in entropy's stable state

become one answer to the puzzle of how

evolution continued in the loss of individualism

with reform of capitalism.

Lance Armstrong Lived Too Strong in French Races for Critics

Lance Armstrong-winner of seven Tour de France bike races was stripped of his victories post hoc when convicted by bike racing's governing body of using performance enhancing drugs. He of course confessed that to Oprah Winfree recently.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-21031177

Armstrong has proven to cancer victims that with the right cocktail of performance enhancers they too might 'live stronger'. Ironically though an admitted prevaricator Armstrong's admission provides more data to cancer survivors about how they too might recover their athletic health and even be better than before. It may be just a matter of time before Lance stars in 'The Six Hundred Million Dollar Man'.

One doesn't want the moral equivalence of an arms race with performance enhancing drugs and genetic engineering of course because of the monstrosities that might emerge-a real incredible hulk-however the public is addicted to breast enlargements and other kinds of enhancers even while the national share of world Global D.P. has dropped from 30 to 21%. Armstrong probably will not long experience majority approbation.

President Obama's Political Weapons of War Used to Support Concentration of Wealth

Socialized in the far eastern nation of Indonesia as a youth President Obama learned how society is of peons under the Suharnos and Suhartos of the world. Chowing down in a nation of dog eaters the young Barrack Obama learned not to rock the boat and disturb the wealthy. He continues that lesson as President of the United States.

President Obama has twice renewed the Bush II tax cuts instead of letting the expire so the U.S.A. can return to fiscal balance. One percent of Americans have as much wealth as 95% of the rest combined. The six heirs of Sam Walton have as much money as 30% of the people of the United States. No wonder they need to heir vets. Those vets with feelings of violence instilled in two foreign wars will need to be read Miranda rights before consulting with psychiatrists who might report their expression about violence to the state security officers for investigation.

President Obama seek Harvard lawyer regulatory changes and is clueless about reforming  the economy. America's 50% most poor have just 2.5% of the wealth between them. The President poses with Hollywood Stars and children as he seeks to disarm Americans so they will be less resistant to the encroaching concentration of wealth and perennial high unemployment. In the past 40 months just 59% of working age Americans had a job. What will the President develop next?

Obama 2nd Term: Increase Debt, Decrease Jobs, Prosperity and Guns

For the past 39  months fewer than 59% of working age Americans had jobs, the trade deficit with China was about 300 billion dollars in 2011. Half a million jobs are outsourced to China each year, more than 100 million Americans are enrolled in some federal welfare program. These and other facts are from a list of 75 economic facts at...

http://www.globalresearch.ca/unemployment-and-poverty-in-america-75-economic-numbers-from-2012-that-are-almost-too-crazy-to-believe/5316546

By the end of the 2nd Obama term the middle class and poor will have continued to wither and the public debt will be about 21 trillion dollars. Considering that no Presidential candidate is likely to have real economic policy able to balance the budget and start paying down the debt, it will only increase to grow and annual interest payments on the debt will be a trillion dollars.

With such a future the Democrat Party may be frightened of American gun ownership down the road. It might be easier to disarm the public and put them all on happy drugs transforming the populous into a kind of opium den without much cognizance of social reality.

Democrats Want Rape of 2nd Amendment To Show Power

Tragically as many as 30 people are killed each year with assault weapons in the U.S.A. In a nation of more than 300 million with more than 30 million legal visitors each year that percent is very small. America has remained a free society with liberal gun ownership, and the traditional wisdom is if it's not broke don't fix it. Democrat Party efforts to break down gun ownership may simply be a show of force and the entitlement to power of feminism. As feminist wisdom goes, rape is a show of power. Cutting down the male dominated gun purchases tradition may be a means to show power raping the second amendment.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/obama-unveils-gun-control-proposals/2013/01/16/58cd70ce-5fed-11e2-9940-6fc488f3fecd_story.html

This morning I went into a U.S. Federal building to get a few tax forms in order to report my income for 2012 early. I was informed by the security guards at the admission station by the metal detector that the tax office had moved away several hundred miles and that they had no forms in the building. I thought about the security a little and of its cost.

A federal worker was let through a special no-search gate. The peons of the public should wear no shoelaces if they visit because they must take their shoes off, and belt off, take out their coins and of course there are no chairs to sit in. One must leave one's knife someplace outside too.

I should say that knives are necessary for boaters to cut lines in emergencies such as if a skiff is tied to a sinking water-logged log towed off a beach and the boat is tarting to go under, and guns are useful for killing a pack of attacking wild dogs along the Yukon-and they do exist. Even a school teacher from Wisconsin was killed while out jogging by a wolf last year-she was of course unarmed and looked like prey in flight.

Have federal security guards ever stopped a truck bomber from detonating outside a federal building by screening inside? Since the federal government hires so many immigrants couldn't one of the federal workers themselves take a gun to work to shoot down his bosses?

With the Democratic effort to use psychiatrists as informers will that occupation need to Mirandize their patients with the warning that 'Anything you say can and may be used against you in a court of law'? The effort to transform psychiatrists into an intelligence gathering branch of the K.G.B.,or rather Homeland Security/Gestapo is probably the worst part of the raping of the second amendment.

Some would think that if guns are restricted overmuch that the small percent of people killed by guns that are not weapons of mass destruction may be supplanted by searches for weapons of mass destruction to get political satisfaction. It doesn't take a genius to realize that SUV gas tanks can have a spark plug placed in them and wired to the ignition, or that magnetically attached detonators can be placed on hundreds of cars with an hour or two before going off. The inventiveness of some of the very frustrated denied equal rights and the opportunity to be armed in self-defense may lapse from armed neutrality into a state of innovative direct opposition.

If some Phd or M.A. in biology invents a new plague in a basement perhaps gathering naturally occurring anthrax in Cuba, or improves Hanta virus or whatever with all of the genomic data available on line the causality count might be thousands of times greater than the 30 or so casualities that happen in America-such as at the California McDonald's massacre decades ago.

Guns have always been an integral part of American civil liberty-and women have tended to shy away from them when not frontiers women. Women, minorities and homosexuals do comprise a new majority willing to sacrifice the second amendment that is not coincidentally placed after the first in order to recognize the need for public defense of free speech with armed potential violence. Yet the groups seeking to rape the second amendment as a show of power are those groups that have never been leaders in the military defense of the United States against enemies of freedom foreign and domestic. It would be good if they took a deep philosophical look at the chasm they seek to leap off before they work further to destroy a state of civil liberty that isn't broken.

Philosophical Ideas On Cosmology and Phase-space

Physical laws of the Universe (1) logically are manifestations of one force. An initial force in various forms and permutations equivalent to mass in sundry, evolved configurations seems the nature of things. The paradox of an initial force or of an initial allotment of force is something to consider and define. What would be the parameters or boundaries of an initial force of which space and time may be contingencies?

 Is it bigger than a breadbox as a potential quantum fact? Is it monistic or plural? Why should the force ever divide itself and become plural even unto having spacing. Once such a force exists it ought to expand and dissipate itself in entropy if a negative space exists and if the force is finite. Yet what if the force is infinite? What boundaries would it have and what would forms would they take?

 Lee Smolin and Roberto Unger were working on a book in 2010 named a The Reality of Time and the Nature of the PhysicalCosmos. Some working through The Perimeter Institute have added recently to the philosophical and scientific tool kit of contemplations for thinking about the Universe (1). Smolin and a few others have developed a theory of an 8 dimensional Universe combining four dimensions of space-time and another four dimensions of momentum-space in phase-space. Momentum space was, I believe, a concept invented by Max Born.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21128241.700-beyond-spacetime-welcome-to-phase-space.html

 The question of is it a Universe or a multiverse seems secondary in philosophical considerations to the phenomenal nature of the initial force prior to the manifestation of time. Can time ever be separable from space? Can space be created that doesn't originally exist or must energy and mass flow into a pre-existing infinite space and/or nothingness?

 Some have considered Darwinian evolution as a model for the way physical laws and perhaps multiverses may evolve. Evolution of biological forms occurs within the energy field of the initial force though. Scientific reductionism to understand the development of the Universe extrapolating from observed or functioning physical law theories applied to life leads one to assume that the advantage of larger clumps of atoms and molecules is in the overall strength of mass and energy localized in a star or in a starfish. Gravitational force drawing mass together is an example problem for consideration of the question of why an initial force would be separate at any point in time to start with?

Treasury Secretary prospect Jack Lew is said to be a revolving door K Streeter that worked for CityGroup with Robert Rubin earning a couple million dollars doing the sort of trading Democrats sought to ban as responsible for the financial collapse of 2008. It's the same old stuff one expects of the Clintonistas that constructed with deregulation the corruption of Wall Street banks and of course Jack  Lew was part of that too with 8 years working for President Bill including a stint running the Office of Management and Budget.

http://washingtonexaminer.com/tim-carney-jack-lew-from-k-street-to-wall-street-to-treasury/article/2518326

Democrats don't care about Wall Street corruption, Republicans profit from it. The unemployed need to worry about President Obama's efforts to add 15 million more revolving door Mexicans to the cheap labor force. With high unemployment and China moving into Cancun and more jobs going south it doesn't seem like work prospects the next four years are good.

It seems unconscionable to consider making illegal aliens legal; rather than asking them to go back through that revolving door to Mexico with U.S. unemployment about 8% and real underemployment about 20%. Mexico isn't a distant third world nation, it's a second world nation that is quite nice. It's illegal immigrants don't join a melting pot as might someone from Bangladesh who can't just go back home on the bus at the end of a work day to Juarez. Adding 15 million dual citizenship Mexicans to the work force would further degrade the job prospects for single passport Americans along the border and elsewhere about whom the Democrats who are 'a party of the middle class' seem to think they just need to slop with four years of unemployment checks and food stamps.

D.H.S. Warns of Java Vulnerability to Hackers-Oracle Patch 7u11 released

I didn't know that D.H.S. tests software for programming vulnerabilities that hackers can exploit. Evidently Java has one, and Sun Systems said they will fix it soon.

I guess D.H.S. has its own top-quality hackers to find ways to eye down the bad guys and gals. Its good they reported one they found.

The recommendation is to temporarily disable Java. If one has firefox its easy to disable Java; simply go to add-ons and select plug ins and click the disable Java button.

http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/technology/2013/01/dhs-warns-that-java-flaw-leaves-computers-vulnerable-to-hackers/

update- Oracle issued an emergency patch for Java, yet some experts say it will take two years to fix.

http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/82135

 http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/7u11-relnotes-1896856.html

Quantum Apocalypse/Holograpahic Universe (video) and My Comments on Dynamic Subjectivism

Since John Dewey popularized the notion that reality and language are subjective various forms of non-realism reinforced with existential thought, even the General Theory of Relativity and more have developed the notion that 'nothing is real'. There are numerous popular videos on youtube on 'The Holographic Universe' and the new foundation in quantum mechanics. Here is one I enjoyed quite a lot.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4dpRPTwsKJs&list=PLB08DD52041319BEF&index=5

I agree that the perception and experience of reality is a phenomenon of mind existing in a quantum field that is interpreted by the brain. I think though that while reality is constructed through a subjective brain-mind channel, there is still something objective to interpret. If one brain-mind interprets Alaskan winters in a tent as cold, so would about anyone else in that circumstance. The quantum forces that produce the potential for cold to be experienced cohere within a steady state of quantum entanglement that determines the potential realm of experience of an observer.

The Holographic Universe videos present an artful and philosophical view of reality with some credibility. A human mind-brain interprets quantum data into a field image and sense data experience, yet the potential to make an image of reality is limited to the quantum material that exists. The brain-mind-observer may determine a particular point of view from all potential worldlines however I do not think the probability states of the quantum realm is anarchic or disordered. An observer may observe just those states that can exist amidst all the possible states. I believe that the probability entanglement status of the solid state Universe (1) is entirely subjective existentially and the possibilities of viewing it through observation are objective while the experience is subjective, so I have a somewhat different opinion of the topic of the videos.

I like the video. I can accept the Berkleyan position of pure ideaism with the theological perspective of a Christian as well as the notion of scientific subjectivism.

Alaska Salmon FIshery Management and-Better Tlingit Tech-knowledge

In days of yore the S.E. Alaska salmon fishery was managed by native Tlingits in such a way that a sustainable fishery existed. The region had permanent fish traps located at streams the salmon returned to spawn in negating the need for motorized quests in competition-with-others at sea. Harvest in fish traps allows a careful measure of salmon taken and precludes significant catch-cheating.

The fish trap caught salmon were taken in a sustainable quantity. After being gutted on-the-spot the fish eggs and then sperm were taken and put in the creek to assure a plentiful return. Fish caught by boats never place fertilized eggs in appropriate creek locations today. Instead fish hatcheries raise hatchlings in remote locations without growing naturally in Alaska rivers. The Yukon River should have such a method to restore the fishery to health.

image credit: N.O.A.A. fishwatch

If such a program was used today the at-sea harvesting by U.S.and foreign vessels ought to be halted to let a full recover of fish populations with right-of-return exist. Today the formerly 100 pound Chinook are increasingly of girlie-man size and number, where they exist at all.

http://www.oregonlive.com/environment/index.ssf/2012/01/obama_consolidation_plan_would.html

Will 2013 Be the Year For Accelerated Arctic Ice Pack Melting?

The year 2012 brought the warmest year on record in the U.S.A. as well as the smallest Arctic ice pack. At some point one might guess that progressive atmospheric warming, and warming of the Arctic Ocean will bring accelerated ice pack melting, as in ice covering a mud puddle that is slow to defreeze one day and increases it melting in time. Maybe it's this year, maybe next decade yet that increased melting rate may develop.

http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/news/ncdc-announces-warmest-year-record-contiguous-us

image credit : N.O.A.A.

image credit: N.A.S.A.

The American Broadcast Media is an Automatic Assault Weapon That Should Be Banned

The American broadcast media is an assault weapon dumbing-down the U.S. electorate-those are the people eligible to vote. It should be banned or carefully restricted through stoppage of federal sales of broadcast wavelengths to the public. Instead those finite wavelengths should be given over to individual citizen podcast rebroadcast use through public computer facilities akin to public highway facilities. Without the presence of individual broadcast entrepreneurs by the millions many of whom are graduates the development of good political sense is defeated a priori. The assault weapon of media ignorance and 'entertainment' continues to build an elite of corruption over the masses.

In days of yore the media was a respectful presenter of 'news'. After the development of cable and the Internet they morphed into some form of predatory wolfen men and women raving at the mooned public.

Select Dark Energy Theories Put to the Test and Found Wanting

Dark energy theories have developed to explain the fairly recently discovered accelerating expansion of the Universe. Many of those theories exploit dark energy (an unknown) for an explanation. Those theories often postulate that the proton to electron mass ratio, which is a fundamental constant, had a different value in the early Universe. Thompson used the new Hubble ultra-deep field photos to show that the proton to electron mass ratio hasn't changed.

http://phys.org/news/2013-01-dark-energy-alternatives-einstein-room.html#ajTabs

Einstein initially developed a theory of a constant cosmological force that would cancel out the effects of gravity that should, if it were not neutralized, draw the mass of the Universe toward a collapse and crunch to a singularity like that hypothesized at the start of Universe (1). Dark energy is regarded as being that force offsetting and overcoming gravity at large scales yet theories about a particular form it might take appear incorrect.

http://map.gsfc.nasa.gov/universe/uni_expansion.html

image credit: N.A.S.A./Ann Field

Einstein's cosmological constant was good while people believed the Universe was in something of a steady state. When Edwin Hubble observed that the Universe (1) is expanding Einstein decried his own cosmological constant saying that it was a booboo. For some reason it didn't occur to anyone back in the day that a cosmological constant was still needed to make the Universe (1) expand even more.

Rather than being a form of energy-another particle, the cosmological constant could have any of a zoo of theoretical causes from extra dimensions changing relationships or size to probability entanglement quantum structures without spacetime.

A Comment on the Philosophy of Maintaining an Optimal State

Winston Churchill notably remarked that democracy is an ineffective form of government yet in comparison to everything else it's the best there is. (paraphrase). The U.S. Government of the past 20 years exemplifies that. It went from a post cold war peace dividend to vast public debt, high unemployment and the record warmest year on record by 2012. The U.S. Government spent more lives and as former V.P. Dick Cheney liked to say, treasure, in fighting a box cutter armed crew of hijacker-crashers than it did during the final phase of the cold war.

Original sin is an implicit element of human behavior. I read Faulkner's brilliant book 'As I Lay Dying' recently. It has a marvelously true description by the departed of her sexual liaison following the drive of sin with her husband following his own impetus of sin. The rest of the book has about the best language of rural America from the 1910s that one might find in literature. The work has existential truisms throughout it and recounts a chapter in the lives of the economically unspoilt. Contemporary America does not exist in such a state of innocence nor of economic simplicity.

Modern America is driven more by drives actualized through special interests. The democracy is a concatenation of special interests with little regard for history lessons. If armed neutrality is a good policy, if reducing the defense department budget by 25% to keep a ready reserved force able to combat in a hypothetical real warm rather than a military police action, if having a 50,000 man special ops corps for world intervention short term action like the foreign legion of yore, the cost of a military reduced in budget yet increased in efficiency without 4 star restaurants in the field could help balance the federal budget and eliminate the public debt. Economic pragmatism though is akin to the course of navigating minimal mass violence internationally, which requires good judgment. Walk softly and carry a big stick.

Sorer Kierkeguarrd was for armed neutrality I seem to recall. Injudicious use of military forces is costly socially and internationally. Yet precipitate withdrawal to accomplish a hypothetical state of non-violence often achieves the opposite effect. The middle course between extremes is useful in policy decisions foreign and domestic, yet any course that is wrong in sailing is as navigators might agree, wrong.

Disarming the citizens of the United States through over-aggressive gun control endangers the careful balances and social history that continued America as a free society while most of the rest of the world was enthralled, serfs, in chains or subjects of aristocrats. The armed history of Americans let them meet the threats of the redcoats as well as confederates though of course, some brave units such as those of New York walked into battle in 1865 en mass with smooth bore weapons to be slaughtered as the faithful had done for decades under government supervision. The histories of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany showed that disarmed citizens are sheep for the slaughter.

If a Christian interested in politics has as a goal the perpetuation of the best state of affairs politically possible with the lowest number of casualties and the highest degree of freedom he must be aware that he is not structuring the City of God. He is instead intervening in the City of Sin. There are pragmatic social structures operating in the City of Sin that require a different balance and use of force than for those ecclesiastical concerns modeled more or less correctly on Christian and Pauline principles, if such churches exist.

The 2001 Afghanistan intervention and the 2014-scheduled withdrawal is another case in point. U.S. failure to remain involved in Afghanistan after the end of the cold war let a festering civil war develop with a Taliban rising to dominate and allow Al Qaeda to attack the U.S.A.  The 2001 intervention was perhaps more than required, and fairly well unthought out. Treasure and lives were dumped-mostly Afghan lives and fewer Americans and international forces. If the conflict could have been directed through less expensive means that would have been better.

The administration has mentioned that it might completely withdraw U.S. forces after 2014. Before that perhaps, repeat of history, the U.S.A. should send a political economy surveyor to Afghanistan to stake out geographic-political units that could survive hostile internal forces if the worst case Vietnamization scenarios unfold as the Taliban is not claiming will happen. With former Northern Alliance forces willing to defend themselves with some U.S. support it is reasonable to develop a Plan B with the experience of Vietnamization as a model vaguely. A partitioned Afghan state could exist if the remainder wants to break off, and would probably be on better terms than the Israel-Palestinian people are.

Political pragmatism used in seeking optimal social scenarios of full employment, low entropy economics with liberty and justice for all is a temporal goal in a sinful world where few are really interested in political philosophy or even the well being of society. Most are perhaps necessarily concerned with helping themselves, and many are encouraged to charge the public expenses to the existential debit card that only that only the abstract wealth machine need make a payment on now and then with a glance at the massive public debt out of curiosity rarely.

When mass social actions go wrong one gets things like world war two with 40 million dead, or the 13th century bubonic plagues, Rwanda, Kampuchea and so forth. When society goes wrong the posturing public in the media and of various institutions just rolls on, and then none know how to fix it, they just let it play through until reaching the embers.

Deflection of Crimes By Liberal Gun Ownership Doesn't Show up In Crime Statistics

Crime statistics show incidents that occur rather than those that don't. Liberal gun ownership has stopped a lot of crimes from occurring in U.S. homes, I would think, that reporters haven't an interest in reporting. Peaceful non-events don't make interesting news.

Isn't it good news that the homicidal maniac saw the 'protected by Smith and Wesson' decal on the door and kept on driving, or that the child snaggers saw the trucks with the gun racks in the driveway and decided to cruise some other neighborhood with signs posted 'This neighborhood has no guns' looking for the next victim?

In the establishment of the United States violent revolutionary action was required to get rid of the British Royal Government and their oppressive class of super-wealthy landowners such as Lord Fairfax to redistribute the land to the people. Violence is de rigueur for revolt against the minority powers that would subjugate the masses. It is only through liberal citizen gun ownership that an oppressive governing class has real limits to the extent they have on compelling their power over the citizens. Democracy must be defended with blood if it to endure.

Washington Crossing the Delaware

painting circa 1851 by Emauel Leutz

These are not remarkable facts. There have been few democracies in history and none at all like that of the U.S.A. For some reason the citizens of most countries were unsuccessful in overthrowing their oppressive rulers, were subjugated by oppressive undemocratic tyrants they could not get rid of, or lacked the will to revolt. In decadent nations endowed initially with an inheritance from God-given revolutionaries of liberal and unrestricted gun ownership rights, the rights may atrophy over time as the citizens cower in their homes relying entirely upon a benevolent big brother government for their own defense. It is ironic that the United States may develop a broadcast media, government and security organs over time quite like that of the former Soviet Union eventually closing out the gun ownership rights that would make any potential tyrannical ruling class think twice about coercing the citizenry into the status of a herd unable to develop private interests.

Like the Roman Republic that fell when its rich Senators became too globally commercialized and less interested in keeping a healthy state allowing an imperium to form, the United States is challenged by the problem of keeping it democracy vital and defended against the very state it comprises. The problem is comparable to keeping the immune system of the body politic free of H.I.V.

The challenge should not be too difficult yet in an era of demagoguery and posturing instead of competence the national interests founder in debt, in defense allocations, in foreign policy and in right reason regarding sexuality for marriage instead of homoeroticism. Nevertheless the dense of civil liberties are founded in the potential for the citizens to meaningfully revolt against the government when necessary, and as in Syria it is difficult to do without adequate weapons. The U.S. Government trusts Syrian and Al Qaeda radicals enough to support them and has armed rebels all over the middle east-it ought at least support the right-of-revolt for its own citizens and trust that they respect the government enough not to do so.