Yen For Ben Monday, 22 September 2014 13:29

The Low Information Voter And The Demise Of America –  Part Three by Peter Burrows 8/30/14   elburropete@gmail.com  silvercityburro.com

Thanks to the wonders of the Internet, you can watch William Buckley interview Thomas Sowell on a 1981 Firing Line show. The issues discussed are still relevant.

Sowell, now in his 80’s, was just starting to be recognized as one of America’s leading scholars. At the time, he had written about a dozen books, and now his total is forty, plus another ten or so of collected essays.  He is long overdue for at least one Nobel prize in economics.

Buckley’s other guest was Harriet F. Pilpel, whom Buckley introduced as a distinguished attorney and feminist.  She impressed me as snobish, elitist, and probably racist.  She could not accept, for example, that an uneducated mother could possibly make better decisions about her children’s education than government experts, so why bother with school vouchers and school choice?

Like liberals everywhere and always, she could not understand that poor, uneducated people are poor and uneducated, NOT STUPID.

She died in 1991 at age 79, and her obituary notes she was a frequent guest on Buckley’s show, and also that she was a long-time ACLU member. (Buckley had a number of good friends on the left of the political spectrum, most notably John Kenneth Galbraith.) She was a graduate of Vassar and Columbia Law, i.e. a highly educated woman.

Sowell became visibly agitated by Ms. Pilpel’s inability to understand that discrimination plays such a minor role in the income disparities of women and minorities.  You see, without discrimination by evil white people, male chauvinist pigs and Republicans there would be no need for affirmative action, the EEOC, feminist causes and all the other BS that makes people like Ms. Pilpel feel good about themselves.

I enjoyed her very much.  She was a wonderful confirmation of my bias against most liberals, especially wealthy East Coast liberals. Over thirty years later, today’s liberals are still spouting the same nonsense about the same issues. Plus ca change, eh?

The gender pay gap, for example, was recently called “an embarrassment” by President Obama: “Today, the average full-time working woman earns just 77 cents for every dollar a man earns — in 2014, that’s an embarrassment. It is wrong.” (Remarks on equal pay for equal work, April 8, 2014.)

The next day, The Washington Post, no conservative bastion, ran a story under “Washington Post Fact Checker” subtitled, “President Obama’s persistent ‘77-cent’ claim gets a new Pinocchio rating: Two vs. One.”

When the Washington Post fact checker finds stories or statements that don’t gibe with the facts, the perpetrators are awarded one to four Pinocchios, One being “some shading of the facts, selective telling of the truth,” four being “Whoppers.”

The Washington Post article of April 9, 2014 by Glenn Kessler, had this to say about Obama’s “77-cent” gender gap: “In 2012— The Fact Checker took a deep dive into the statistics behind this factoid and found it wanting.  We awarded the president only (one) Pinocchio, largely because he is citing Census Bureau data, but have wondered since if we were too generous.  We also called out the president when he used this fact in the 2013 State of the Union address, and in the 2014 State of the Union address. And yet he keeps using it, as do many other Democrats.”

The rest of the article has a pretty good rundown on why the pay gap disappears when all factors are considered.  Included was the finding that “women who do not get married have virtually no wage gap –.” Sowell made the same point in 1981 on Firing Line. (1981!) He said the pay gap between single women and single men was very misleading because “never married” single women frequently had HIGHER incomes than their male counterparts.

(Marriage interrupts many more female careers than male careers, and career interruptions hurt earning power, but the category “single” doesn’t distinguish between women with interrupted and uninterrupted careers.  The divorced or widowed woman thrown back into the job market is going to suffer a lower income than if she had never married and never left the job. That’s just a sad fact of life.)

For a really thorough analysis of the gender pay issue, I strongly recommend Kay Hymowitz’s articles on the topic, especially “Why the Gender Gap Won’t Go Away. Ever.”, City Journal, Summer 2011.  For more distaff objections to gender gap demagoguery, Google June E. O’Neill, another brilliant lady.

The Washington Post article concludes by noting that the Census Bureau’s raw 77-cent figure is, from the Democrats’ perspective, “golden,” something Democrats “can keep bringing up every two years.”  The president, however, should “acknowledge that ‘77 cents’ does not begin to capture what is actually happening in the work force and society. Thus we are boosting the rating on this factoid to Two Pinocchios.”

They were tempted to go to three but didn’t because “the president was relying on an official government statistic—.”  Horse pucky, as MASH’s Colonel Sherman T. Potter would say.  The president is engaging in demagoguery approaching outright lying, and I think he’s smart enough to know it. He doesn’t care, because getting a couple of Pinocchios from the Washington Post is an inside the beltway joke, something the rest of the country won’t pay any attention to.

The same standards used to get the 77-cent figure also show that on the president’s staff women earn only 91- cents per dollar of men‘s wages.  That’s good compared to women working for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, who are paid only 70 cents for every dollar men make.

So what and who cares? The low information voter is going to hear the 77-cent mantra and buy into the charge that Republicans are against equal pay for equal work. To further this low-info-vote-getter theme, on April 1 — an apt date — of this year, Senator Barbara Mikulski (D-MD) introduced the Paycheck Fairness Act.  Similar bills have bounced around Congress since 2009 and none have gone far, probably because no one, except lawyers, really wants to implement such a draconian overhaul of the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, known as the Equal Pay Act.

Wikipedia has a detailed description of the bill, and under Debate and Discussion has the following:  “Democrats said they intend to use the votes on this bill and the issue of equal pay as political issues in the 2014 midterm elections. Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY) told reporters that ‘pay equity, that’s women, that’s 53 percent of the vote.’ ”

Schumer is correctly assuming that Republicans will vote against the bill, especially since no amendments are being allowed by Harry Reid in the senate, and that it blatantly benefits trial lawyers, a Democrat special interest group, by removing caps on punitive damages against businesses found guilty of discriminating against women.  Plus, as I read it, the bill places proof of innocence on the accused, i.e. accused employers are guilty until proven innocent.  Of the lawyers, by the lawyers and for the lawyers.

Expect the Democrats to beat this old pay-gap lie for all its worth. For example, first term Senator from Massachusetts, rising progressive star and Cherokee descendent Elizabeth Warren, recently gave a speech laying out her 11 “Commandments of Progressivism,” number eight being: “We believe – I can’t believe I have to say this in 2014 – we believe in equal pay for equal work.”

Gosh, Senator, Harvard Professor and Native American wanna be, so do the rest of us.  And if you actually believe there ISN’T equal pay for equal work, why don’t you start a company and hire women for 78-cents on the dollar, a raise from the 77-cent MCP companies pay, and then put those 100-cent male companies out of business, thanks to your lower wage costs?

Oh well, that would require thinking instead of emoting.  Speaking of which, Senator Barbara Mikulski, who introduced the bill, said, “It brings tears to my eyes to know women are working so hard and  being paid less– it makes me emotional when I hear that — I get angry, I get outraged and I get volcanic.”

Oh, my. What to say? One is at a loss for words.  Perhaps it’s time to channel my dear late grandmother, whose default emotion was compassion: “Oh, the poor Dear.” Or, perhaps it is time to bend over and call into service what Mark Twain called “the nether throat” and deliver unto Ms. Mikulski an appropriate response, also volcanic.

The Low Information Voter And The Demise of America – Part Two by Peter Burrows 8/25/14  elburropete@gmail.com  silvercityburro.com

Winston Churchill once famously quipped, “It has been said democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried.”  He also said, “The best argument against democracy is a five minute conversation with the average voter.”

The Founding Fathers probably would have agreed with both of Churchill’s observations.  While they wanted nothing to do with monarchies or dictatorships, they also profoundly distrusted democracies, which they saw as fatally susceptible to demagoguery and mob rule.  However, the right kind of democracy, a representative democracy, or republic, if properly designed might provide sufficient protection from democracy’s tendency to self destruct.

To put the people in charge, yet check the power of the madding crowd, one of the protective things our Founding Fathers did was design a clever system that required laws be approved by two very different legislative bodies. One would be a House of Representatives whose members serve two years and are voted into office by the people.  The other would be a Senate composed of state representatives, two per state, whose members serve six years and would  protect the states’ rights against any trespasses by the central government.

The kicker, which very few people today are aware of, was that these state senators were not to be elected by the people, but as the Constitution directs, “chosen by the Legislature thereof”, i.e. the state legislators.  This changed in 1913 with the seventeenth amendment, which directed senators also be elected by the general populace.

While this was a step toward a more “pure” democracy, it also greatly increased our exposure to the self destructive abuses of democracy.  Instead of having one house of two-year elected politicians held in check by a second house of six-year citizen volunteers, we now have both houses composed of elected politicians, almost all of whom have as their number one priority getting reelected.

Today, contrary to constitutional design, there is no essential difference between the House and the Senate.  Of course, since senators only run for reelection every six years instead of two, they don‘t have to spend ALL their time campaigning and raising money. This means senators can study issues more thoroughly, be more statesman-like, even wise, in their decisions and pronouncements.  Senator Harry Reid of Nevada comes to mind.

Now, imagine the seventeenth amendment was never passed.  What kind of people do you think state legislatures  would consider for appointment to the U.S. Senate?

The first thing that comes to my mind when pondering that question is that there are many people who would make great senators who wouldn’t ever consider running for the office.  The campaign mechanics are too daunting.  It takes some sort of masochist to endure the travel, speeches, fund raising, butt-kissing, and loss of privacy, not to mention the ad hominem gauntlet candidates have to run.

Wouldn’t it be nice to have a senate where many of the members were appointed because they had distinguished themselves in medicine, science, business or academia, i.e. some field other than politics?  Wouldn’t it be nice to have a senate where most members didn’t care about running for reelection, or in fact wouldn‘t even be interested in another term?

Wouldn’t it be nice to have a senate where the members had the political freedom to actually read the bills before they voted on them? Wouldn’t it be nice to have a senate where no member was beholden to special interests, or, most importantly, had to worry about the opinion of those average voters that Churchill jokingly (?) referred to?

No sense in daydreaming: We don’t have an Olympian Senate to protect us from ourselves. Churchill’s average voter elects both the House and the Senate, and the complexity of the issues today means that each of us is a low information voter on most issues, susceptible to demagoguery and prone to vote for politicians who say they can “fix” things if only we give them enough power, which always means a bigger and more intrusive government

The truth of what Jefferson said almost 200 years ago is becoming apparent: “If a nation expects to be ignorant – and free – in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.”

The Low Information Voter And The Demise Of America by Peter Burrows – 8/15/14 elburropete@gmail.com – silvercityburro.com

I‘m not a big Bill O‘Reilly fan, but his segment “Watters’ World” is a hoot. Reporter Jesse Watters takes his microphone and cameraman into the damnedest places and asks people the damnedest questions, some funny and some not so funny.  The question that always pops into my mind: “These people VOTE??”

Sadly, most people Watters talks to don’t know much, if anything, about current affairs or American history.  He says he doesn’t cherry pick his broadcasted interviews, and I tend to believe him, for the simple reason that the low information voter is hardly a new phenomenon.  I remember years ago the Steve Allen Show would occasionally have live interviews of the man on the street. Typical question and answer:

Q. “Do you think President Eisenhower has scruples?”
A. “No. I think his doctors would have found them by now.”

Government has gotten a lot more intrusive and complex since then.  We didn’t as many have federal bureaucracies constantly issuing new regulations telling us what kind of light bulbs to buy or how much water our toilets can use.  Since Ike’s day, cabinet level government departments have been created to deal with perceived problems in the areas of energy, housing, environment, education, transportation and terrorism.

Back then, Congress wasn’t passing laws that numbered in the thousands of pages that no elected official either read or wrote.  As Speaker Pelosi said of the Affordable Care Act, “We have to pass the bill so you can find out what’s in it.”  She took some flak for that comment, but she was just telling it like it is in Washington.

As the government takes on more and more duties, most of which I think are unconstitutional, “pass the law to know what’s in it” simply reflects the fact that complex legislation is being written by, and our government is being run by, bureaucratic “experts,” and they will write the laws and run the government for their benefit, not ours.

In this, they are strongly abetted by some elected office holders who openly think America’s democratic republic is cumbersome, inefficient and way too slow.  The New York Times columnist and progressive Thomas Friedman, in one of his books and at least twice on television, has fantasized about how nice it would be to be China for a day, “–where we could actually, you know, authorize the right solutions –.”

Right solutions? I guarantee my right solutions aren’t your right solutions, Tom.  For instance, every now and then I fantasize I’m Mao for a day, and the first thing I do is strip America’s Tom Friedmans of all their worldly assets and send them down to Cuba to help the Castro brothers harvest sugar cane.  From each according to his abilities, you know.

Somebody should clue Friedman in: THE CONSTITUTION WAS WRITTEN TO MAKE GOVERNING DIFFICULT. Naturally, this is something people with a totalitarian bent don’t like, and in America, such people have included Presidents Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, to which we can now add Barrack Obama, who is issuing executive orders that many say are in contempt of the Constitution.

A primary goal of our Constitution was to ensure the executive branch didn’t acquire dictatorial powers.  The legislative and the judicial branches were to act as checks to the executive.  They aren’t doing this and it’s our fault.  Very few people know how our government is supposed to work or, more importantly, WHY the Constitution was written as it was.

This is the number one ignorance that can lead to the demise of what may be an impossible dream: That government of the people, by the people for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Peter Burrows  elburropete@gmail.com and silvercityburro.com 6/29/14

Not long ago I watched a guest on a PBS show tell the host that he, the guest, who was an “expert” on global warming (GW), did not know of any serious scientific disagreement on the GW issue, i.e. all the scientists saw GW as real, man made, and dangerous. The host was nodding in agreement and I thought, “What a useful idiot that guy is.  He believes anything he‘s told if it agrees with his bias.”

Then I thought, “That’s not fair, Burro. The Public TV kid is just trying to do his job. Probably suffers from a really expensive, almost useless college education that didn’t prepare him to be skeptical of government pushed agendas.  Besides, you don’t even know just what constitutes a ‘useful idiot.’”

So, for my own peace of mind, I went to Wikipedia and found that ‘useful idiot’ refers to “ people perceived as propagandists for a cause whose goals they are not fully aware of and who are used cynically by the leaders of the cause.”  The term has historically been used to describe slavish followers of Communism and is usually attributed to Lenin, though there’s no record of him ever using the term.

Wikipedia goes on to tell us of a similar term, useful innocents, coined by the late economist Ludwig von Mises.  Von Mises said useful innocents are “confused and misguided sympathizers,” and he was also referring to liberals being used by communists.

I like ‘useful innocents.’  It’s a better term for MOST people than ‘useful idiots,’ which I’ve always associated with unblinking true believers and fanatics. Useful innocents, for example, is a good description of most people who back increasing the minimum wage.  Most folks don’t spend any time studying economics or thinking about the minimum wage, they just think raising it is a good idea and go on their way. These are not the folks found picketing outside of fast food restaurants demanding higher minimum wages. Those folks are useful idiots.

Back to the PBS show.  I had it wrong.  The host was a useful innocent, nodding in agreement on a topic he knew little about.  It was the guest who was the a useful idiot, busily spreading one of the bedrock lies of  GW propaganda, which is that no serious scientist disputes global warming, and by implication, the global warming agenda. This is WRONG.

When confronted by a global warmist who says there’s a consensus on the scientific merits of GW– and ergo the proposed efforts to counter GW — do not a useful innocent be.  Simply give the useful idiot a copy of the following list of names, all gleaned from over twenty years of files gathered on the subject of global warming.

These are all respected scientists, engineers, and/or climate experts who disagree with some or most of the current Global Warming religion. The list could be four or five times as long, but I don’t expect anybody to check more than a few names.  For a really long list of GW skeptics, Google “Oregon petition” or “NASA letter climate change.”  The site  “denierlist.wordpress.com”  is also a good, if ironic, source.

Whether the below individuals are right or wrong is not the point.  The point is that anybody who says there is a broad scientific consensus on climate change, its causes and consequences, is a useful idiot.  Maybe not so useful.

In no particular order after Dr. Evans.

1)   Dr. David M.W. Evans, Australian mathematician/engineer.  See “The Skeptic’s Case” 2/3/12.  Definitive.
2)   Dr. Judith Curry, Georgia Tech.
3)   Dr. Willie Soon, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics
4)   Dr. Richard Lindzen, Harvard
5)   Dr. Nils-Axel Morner, Swedish sea-level expert
6)   Dr. David Deming, University of Oklahoma
7)   Dr. Roy W. Spencer, University of Alabama
8)   Dr. H. Abdussamatov (Better hope this guy is wrong!) Director of Space Physics, Polkovo Observatory
9)   Dr. William Happer, Princeton
10) Dr. James Lovelock, Gaia Theorist, global warming reversal of opinion
11) Dr. Robert Balling, Arizona State
12) Dr. Henrik Svensmark (Google with CERN) Director, Center for Sun-Climate Research, Denmark
13) Lennart Bengtsson, Swedish meteorologist
14) Joe Bastadi, American meteorologist
15) Burt Rutan, Aerospace engineer

Hillary: The Girl Can’t Help It    Peter Burrows elburropete@gmail.com   6/25/14

“She can’t help it, the girl can’t help it.” Bobby Troup, 1956

Some years ago, then Nebraska Senator Robert Kerrey said of President Bill Clinton: “Clinton’s an unusually good liar.  Unusually good.”  Kerrey, a two term Democrat, went on to become President of The New School, a New York City university.  He tried to regain his seat in 2012, but lost to Republican Deb Fischer. I hope she’s as honest as he was.

Kerrey’s comment came to mind when I saw Hillary “We Were Dead Broke” Clinton pushing her new book on TV.  It also brought to mind a George Will column (Sleaze The Sequel, 3/20/2000) in which Will noted, “–the bargain that (Bill Clinton) and his wife call a marriage refutes the axiom that opposites attract.”

I would have to say about Hillary Clinton, borrowing from Senator Kerrey, that she’s not a good liar. In fact, she’s an unusually bad liar.  Bad liars tell lies that can easily be shown to be lies, but they lie anyway because they just can’t help it.

Example number one in Hillary’s case is claiming she was named after the famous New Zealand mountain climber, Edmond Hillary, who gained fame only when he became the first to scale Mt. Everest in 1953, some SIX YEARS AFTER HILLARY WAS BORN.

Just a detail.  Her parents no doubt foresaw Edmund Hillary’s success because they were good friends with Edgar Cayce, or maybe the Rodham clan are descendents of Nostradamus.  Whatever.

Even husband Bill bought into that one, as he said on page 870 (870!) of his autobiography: “Sir Edmund Hillary, who had explored the South Pole in the 1950s, was the first man to reach the top of Mount Everest and, most important, was the man Chelsea’s mother had been named for.”

Get that?  MOST IMPORTANT!! Humility is something else Hill and Bill share.

I guess someone could say that Hillary’s parents told her that little fib to explain why she wasn’t named something more ordinary, e.g. Alice, Mary, or Eleanor. Ooops! That reminds me. Hillary says she’s chatted over the years with FDR’s wife for advice and inspiration, Mahatma Ghandi, too.

Maybe it was Eleanor who told Hillary to  “Duck!!” when the snipers opened up on Hillary and daughter Chelsea when they deplaned at Tuzla, Bosnia, in March, 1996.  Nobody ELSE saw or heard the bullets flying, but if Hillary did, never mind Eleanor, that’s good enough for the NOW crowd.

Not good enough, however, for the Washington Post: “Clinton’s tale of landing at Tuzla airport ‘under sniper fire’ and then running for cover us simply not credible. Photographs and video of the arrival — tell a very different story. Four Pinocchios.”

The girl can’t help it.

My favorite Hillary-Pinocchio goes back to her days as a brilliant commodity trader, when she turned a thousand bucks into ONE HUNDRED THOUSAND before giving it all up to stand by her man as he battled the forces of evil as Governor of Arkansas.  She said she gleaned the necessary information from the pages of The Wall Street Journal, though later admitted that she had some help with her commodity investments from a high official at Tyson Foods.  Help? Yeah.

Mark Steyn hit the nail on the head when he observed about Hillary, “There’s something weird about the need to tell quite so many unnecessary fictions.”  I wonder how long before the next “unnecessary fiction.”  There will be more. The girl can’t help it.

The Republicans Will Screw it Up, Part Two by Peter Burrows elburropete@gmail.com 5/13/14

The Democrats will be playing the race card over and over in this fall’s elections.  They do that because it fires up minority voters and puts Republicans on the defensive.  In short, the Democrats play the race card because it works.

The Republicans should do the same thing, but they won‘t. They’ll  let the Democrats beat them up on the race issue and lose elections they should win.

You’re probably thinking: “Huh? How can Republicans play the race card when everybody ‘knows’ Republicans are the racists?”

In fact, nothing could be easier.  One only has to raise Hell about the results of policies and laws backed by the Democrats.  Ignore all the rhetoric and all the good intentions, and start talking about the real world effects on minorities due to laws pushed by the Democrats. All it takes is a little courage.  Some good old-fashioned righteous indignation would help, too.

Exhibit “A” is the minimum wage law. Let’s ignore the economic arguments against the minimum wage. I’ve covered those in previous columns. (See them at silvercityburro.com.)  The racial argument against minimum wage laws is glaringly apparent in the devastating effect such laws have on the employment of black teenagers.

The most recent numbers I’ve seen from January of this year showed black teenage unemployment at 38 percent, roughly twice that of white teenagers.  This disparity has existed for decades.  It wasn’t always that way.

In 1973, economist Milton Friedman pointed out that in the late forties and early fifties, before the minimum wage started to be dramatically increased, black teenage unemployment was equal to or less than white teenage unemployment. Friedman called the minimum wage law “one of he most anti-negro laws on the books.”

What has changed since 1973?  Nothing.

Why then, is President Obama, our first black president, pushing to increase the minimum wage from $7.25 to $10.10?  He either doesn’t know about the negative effect on black teens or doesn’t care. Either way, somebody should ask him why he’s so eager to throw black kids under the bus.

It won’t be a Republican.  Some of them go along with minimum wage stupidity, most notably Mitt Romney, who lost to Obama in 2012, and Susan Collins, Republican Senator from Maine.  She wants a “compromise” on increasing the minimum wage, that is, she’s OK with increasing it, just not as high as $10.10.  .

No, it won’t be a Republican who calls the minimum wage a racist piece of crap. What we need is a new Malcolm X, who said this in 1964 about blacks’ slavish support of the Democratic Party: “You put them first, and they put you last.  ‘Cause you’re a chump. A political chump!”

He went on to say, “Any time you throw your weight behind a political party — and that party can’t keep the promise that it made to you during election time, and you are dumb enough to walk around continuing to identify with that party — you’re not only a chump but a traitor to your race!” (From Larry Elder’s 3/13/14 column.)

What has changed since 1964?  Nothing.  (For an update, check out “Black People Duped” by Walter Williams, 3/14/14.)

I can think of no black leader today with the “street creds” of Malcolm X.  Of course, any black who called Obama’s minimum wage push “racist” would immediately be bombarded by cries of “Uncle Tom.”

So, instead of waiting for another Malcolm X, I suggest the Republicans take a page out of the Democrats’ Race War Manual and sue the federal government on the grounds that the minimum wage law has a “disparate impact” on minorities.  The disparate impact theory holds that racial discrimination is demonstrated by merely using statistics, intent be damned. Under the Obama administration, this approach is becoming the standard in “every area of the law.” (Roger Clegg, WSJ editorial page, 2/25/13.)

Such a lawsuit might not hold up in court, but it would sure give the beleaguered Republicans a chance to raise Holy Hell, invoke the memory of Malcolm X, and show how comfortable some blacks are on “Uncle Sam’s plantation,” to borrow Star Parker’s memorable book title.

In addition, since they won’t be able to repeal the minimum wage, the Republicans should propose that the minimum wage at least be eliminated for any worker below the age of 20. This would mean an employer can hire teenagers for whatever they will work for, no government interference.

PLUS — and this is a biggie — the Republicans should propose that NO Social Security be withheld from teens’ paychecks.  This means teenagers can be hired at a lower net cost to the employer, and a higher take-home for the teen worker. A real win-win.

(The current law requires 12.4% of the paycheck go to the FICA tax, half from the employee, half from the employer. )

Some states will still keep their minimum wage laws, but hopefully not for long because states that don’t will see a big increase in teenage employment.

One thing that must be emphasized, is that job benefits for teens go far beyond the few dollars earned. A job is a great learning experience, for some more valuable than anything they‘re getting in their schools.  Kids can’t get this experience if there are no jobs for them.

Of course the labor unions will scream bloody murder and threaten to burn down D.C. Obama and the Democrats will then put big lusty smooches on all those union derrieres and refuse to even consider such a “child labor” proposal from the heartless Republicans, who “only care about rich people and employers”  and blah blah blah.

Sigh.

What a sad state of affairs when people get hurt by lying hypocritical politicians, and then they turn around and vote for the SOBs.  Where are you Malcolm X?

By Peter Burrows elburropete@gmail.com 3/2/14

If there’s anybody out there who doesn’t like my columns, don’t blame me. It turns out I didn’t write them, somebody else did (and the SOB can’t spell worth a hoot.)  I owe this great insight to President Barrack Obama.

He famously said while campaigning,  “If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.” He was referring to the opportunities inherent in our American society: “Somebody helped create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive.”

Most of us would agree that we are very lucky to live in The Land of Opportunity.  Warren Buffet, when asked the secret to his success, quipped that it started by being born in America: “I won that lottery,” he said.

The undeniable truth is that America has been a land of opportunity because it has been a nation characterized by a “government of the people, by the people and for the people” as Lincoln said in the Gettysburg address.  In short, a nation where the government worked for the people, not the other way around.

This was hardly the message President Obama delivered.  He was implying that the government was the source of your good fortune.  He has it backwards: The people created the government first.  Anything that results from that is an extension of the peoples’ genius. Yes, you did build that business, thanks to first building a government that values individual freedoms above government power — or at least used to

President Obama’s subtle message is that since you didn’t build that, YOU REALLY DON’T OWN IT.  You may think you do, but when push comes to shove, the government owns it. Government worshipers really believe this.

What this means is that I’ve given up plans to write my panoramic, historically based novel which would have put “Gone With the Wind” to shame. You see I went to public schools where I learned the rudiments of the three R’s taught by government paid teachers.  I sit safely at my desk thanks to government paid police. The lights and heat are on thanks to government regulated utilities. I could go on and on, but you get my drift.

According to President Obama and the legions who agree with him, I owe everything to the government. As to my best selling novel, President Obama would say: “You didn’t write that.  Somebody else did.”  Which means, just like the owner of a business,  I’m not really entitled to any of the profits from the book sales, movie rights, royalties or the cash I’ll get from winning the Pulitzer and Nobel Prizes. So I just won’t write the damn thing.

Don’t be surprised if many, many others decide not to start an enterprise, or decide to abandon one they’ve already started.  Obama is becoming the CEO of everybodys’ business, determining health care costs and worker pay.  To that end he wants Congress to “give America a raise” by increasing the minimum wage.  Not content to wait, he unilaterally raised government contractors’ minimum wage.

He has lots of support for his totalitarian mentality. Thomas Friedman, the noted New York Times writer and author, let the cat out of the bag when he once fantasized, “–what if we could be China for a day?” Then we could, according to Friedman, “authorize the right solutions.”  He of course meant “dictate” solutions HE thinks are right. (Friedman wouldn’t like MY “right solutions”.)

Democratic Senators Levin and Schumer, exercising their China-for-a-day mentality, encouraged the IRS to investigate groups actively opposing the expansion of government.  Most alarmingly, what was the Obama administration thinking when it floated the idea of FCC “observers” in media newsrooms, including newspapers?

Maybe President Obama did us all a favor by articulating and acting on the tacit assumption of progressives and liberals everywhere: The government owns the people.  He gave us fair warning. In his world, America is a nation of, by, and for the government.

At Gettysburg, Lincoln’s immortal conclusion still enthralls: “–we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, and for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

Now, just over 150 years later, are we going to renew that resolve?  Did they, and so many others, die in vain?

Monsters From The Id  by Peter Burrows elburropete@gmail.com – 2/25/14

I read recently that scientists in England are having success improving some peoples’ mathematical abilities by using mild electrical stimulation to their brains.  This reminded me of a classic sci-fi film from 1956, “Forbidden Planet.”

The plot, in brief, has a space ship landing on a planet inhabited by only two people who arrived there sometime in the past, a mad scientist and his really ugly daughter. (Sure.)  He tells the new arrivals that the planet was once occupied by an advanced species that totally and mysteriously disappeared.

Still intact is a vast system of power generation and a device that, when strapped to the head, either measures intelligence or, at the flip of a switch, gives the brain an intelligence boosting electrical shock.  The mad scientist had given himself the shock treatment and had barely survived, though with a newly enhanced intelligence far higher than he had prior to the shock, and far higher than any of the newcomers.

Since mini-skirts were the craze throughout the galaxy, you don’t need to press a AA battery to your forehead to know that the inevitable soon begins to happen between daughter and Captain astronaut.  This, Papa doesn’t like, but even he doesn‘t know how much he doesn’t like it.

As the romance blossoms, the astronauts come under ever more ferocious attacks by invisible beings.  Just when the end looks near, one of the astronauts puts on the headset, gives himself an intelligence shock, and, sure enough, it does him in.  Before dying, he whispers that the jolt gave him the insight on their dilemma, namely, that they were being attacked by “monsters from the Id.”

Back in those days, Freudian psychology had captured the public imagination, so many in the audience were probably familiar with the mad scientist’s explanation when asked what the Id was:  “It’s an obsolete term once used to describe the elementary basis of the subconscious mind.”

Think of the Id as the source of the survival instinct, the kill-or-be-killed reaction, the unreasoning source of hate, lust, and fear.  This, of course, is immediately understood by our hero-lover-astronaut, who sees the source of all their troubles in the subconscious of the mad scientist father, who fears losing his daughter. Of more importance, the father has the intelligence to command the vast power of the forbidden planet through telekinetic abilities he doesn’t know he has, can‘t control, and which will lead to their total destruction.

I won’t bother you with the ending, other than to say it is an apt metaphor for our times.  The technology to destroy ourselves, as happened to the original inhabitants of the Forbidden Planet, is spreading rapidly, and we remain little more than intelligent apes, prone to primitive, tribal emotions that may not have been so dangerous in the past, though disastrous enough.

Who would deny that Hitler was a monster from the Id?  Furthermore, he Pied- Pipered the whole nation to follow him.  Up until they started losing the war, the German people adored Adolph Hitler, the Id monster. Just look at the young ladies in the crowds from 1930’s documentaries.  Elvis never had such “love.“

Furthermore, and this is the really scary part, a disinterested Martian paying us a visit in 1910, if asked to pick the most advanced, civilized, prosperous society on earth, would probably have picked Germany. Fast forward 25 years and Germany was ruled by a monster from the Id. What if Hitler had possessed nuclear weapons?

There are three facts of life I wish were not true, but are:
1) Monsters from the Id will always be with us.
2) The spread of WMD means we can not afford the luxury of a Neville “Peace in our time” Chamberlain.
3) Neville Chamberlains will always be with us.

In a MAD age, an age of mutually assured destruction, monsters from the Id will hopefully be held in check by a simple desire for self-preservation. But, and this is very relevant, what if a nuclear armed monster from the Id is suicidal?

I am thinking of the Muslim sect known as Mahdaviats, Shia Muslims who believe the world will be saved by the Twelfth Imam, also known as the Mahdi, who disappeared in the ninth century and will return to save a world descended into chaos and destruction. Shia Muslims rule Iran and Iran is developing nuclear weapons.

President Obama once said we needn’t worry about Muslims using nuclear weapons because that would be against their religion. He couldn’t have been more mistaken. In fact, some Mahdaviats believe it is their religious duty to hasten the Imam’s return by creating the chaos required, e.g. by using nuclear weapons if/when they have them. If they die as a result, Allah has promised them Paradise.

In such a world, MAD is not a deterrent but an encouragement. Monsters from the Id, indeed.

Iranian President Mahmoud Amadinejad ordered the widening of a boulevard in Tehran to accommodate the triumphal return of the Twelfth Imam.  Why would he do such a thing? He is no longer president, but the new Iranian President, Hasan Rouhani, in a speech last May, said: “Saying ‘Death to America’ is easy. We need to express ’Death to America’ with action.”

The Iranians say they are not trying to build nuclear weapons, and even if true for now, their long range intentions are very suspect. They’ve been waiting for the Mahdi for over 11 centuries. A few more years, or decades, to gather the means to start the final confrontation with the Satanic West is of little import.

The number one question: Are they really planning to start a nuclear holocaust as a religious imperative?  If so, preemptive war, not Neville Chamberlain, is the only rational course of action..

Question number two, maybe it’s really number one: Do we have the moral courage for such a course of action?