The post-modern America - bad road map leads to being lost!
I have been in mourning for our nation.
Last weekend we wanted to visit our oldest daughter's family and they had moved to a new location, still less than an hour away but a place we had not seen. She had sent an email with specific instructions but I missed in the the mass of emails I have to sift through during each day. So we turned to an online map site to give us the directions. She was sure I had the email and I was not worried about finding the house because my wife had the cellphone.
First the way I mapped out was not a good idea as an accident had blocked the interstate. We saw that it was a huge line of unmoving traffic in time to get off the interstate onto an ordinary highway. So at that point the map was not as useful. However, I was sure once I found the highway close to their new place we would be fine.
Before gas prices were high, in my youth, I would purposely get lost whenever moving to a new town or city and find my way back. I would do this going North, South, East and West. I learned how to get around every area from all over with the exception of Washington, DC, which was apparently designed to lose people in the suburban regions for hours. DC has streets like spokes of a wheel, streets in a grid and random roads that cut through and occasionally dead end at a park or memorial.
So I was driving in grid fashion, moving North until hitting a barrier, then East or West until I found another good route North and finally wound up on the highway that would lead us close to the new house.
However, as we were back on the map we soon found that the map was wrong and the road ended before reaching their house. We made it up to the 500's and their address was in the 600's. It was at this point that my wife realized she'd left the cell phone at home and we could not call for directions. We spent an hour driving everywhere in the vicinity trying to find that last block of missing street with no success. I took us to a local gas station where I thought perhaps someone might have some idea of the area or perhaps there was that now-rarely-found pay phone? Fortunately one of the girls at the pay counter offered the company phone to us. My daughter gave us final directions.
However, their road was so disguised that they made the decision to walk out to the nearest intersection to walk us to their place. My son-in-law certainly picked a great place to live if you wish to avoid house-to-house salesmen, although I hope the fire department could find it. Their road looks like a driveway for another home. You would never think it led to a property farther in! The only relative I have had with a harder place to find lived on an unmarked gravel road far out in the country officially, but if you found it you would not see his place. You had turn into the driveway of a farmhouse, pass the farmhouse and go through three different cattle gates (keeping an eye out for the cows) and then take a hidden serpentine drive over and down a river bluff to a property that nobody would ever think was there! His backyard was a creek that fed into a river, he had two small houses built up on the side of the bluff and a shiny silver Airstream trailer in which he lived. He had electric and phone and television cable hookups leading down from the bluff. Once a flood swooped up his trailer and deposited it many miles downstream and he was able to retrieve and remodel it to his satisfaction.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Our country once had a roadmap for success. We call it the Constitution. But much like my trip to my daughter's house, the nation got off the interstate (Constitutional government) and has been wandering around turning one way and another while trying to incorporate Socialism into a free society. Right now our nation, the USA, is like we were after a long time driving around lost - we do not know where we are and we cannot see where we are going but we cannot continue to wander around lost for long. The White House has a plan for us and it looks much like the plans that Lenin and Mao and Hitler and Castro and other dictators have used. Demonize the people who are productive, convince those without that they deserve what others have and then leverage them to put themselves into a position of power that is difficult to dislodge.
Barack Obama's regime is quite possibly the end of the road for the USA unless we get help in the form of better information to save us from the natural end of Socialism - tyranny. Whether it is labeled Fascism or Socialism or Communism, the concept of the collectivist State is flawed because it naturally leads to a mass of serfs ruled by a small, rich set of elites. Barack Obama is simply the face of a Statist movement, one whose school records have been protected by millions of dollars in court costs and attorney fees, a man who has no birth certificate that has not been altered, one who once claimed to be a native of Kenya and was at one time a citizen of Indonesia. When away from his teleprompter he is a continual source of malapropism and mispronunciations. He is the product of smooth speechwriters and the American need to absolve itself of a racist past. Funny how it was the Democrats who invented Jim Crow laws and the Republicans who led the fight for racial equality and yet it is the Democrats who have figured out how to keep the poor dependent upon government and unlikely to achieve success, thus reaping their votes...along with a few grateful dead folks.
Sad that politicians in this country have convinced enough people that the government is supposed to take care of them rather than simply protect their right to take care of themselves, that it is meant to provide for basic needs rather than provide for opportunity to be successful and that it is in control of the people rather than being the servants of the people. With bad science, re-written history and disastrous philosophies the Elites always are the enemies of the Free and tyranny is always willing to use the Big Lie to fool the foolish.
Just look at the 2012 American election. Big cities got Obama elected. He got about 60% of the young vote (inexperienced people having been indoctrinated by the public schools but not yet having graduated the college of hard knocks). Otherwise it was the cities, dominated by Democrat machine politics in conjunction with Union bosses and a few generations of the poor who have been convinced they deserve a paycheck for existing and prefer the paltry handouts of government than the opportunities to succeed at something, in part because they have been taught to value the wrong things.
Our society rewards women for having children outside of wedlock. It rewards poor people with a subsistence paycheck. It makes for fatherless children and bad schools with dropouts that are not even recognized. How many schools claim attendees that never show up for class in order to get their share of tax dollars? It encourages crime by therefore making the inner cities the perfect environments for organized crime and black market activities that avoid all taxation or oversight. Ironically there is a bit of freedom and capitalism within the black market that government does not touch because it does not see it.
courtesy of 100 percent FED UP
Tip of the hat to Jonathan Sarfati for cluing me in to this column, below. Pay special attention to the top ten. Sadly it is true that school children are no longer taught how to think critically but rather simply told what to think and believe. Sad also that the politicians making the decisions that bankrupt the nation make sure they get theirs no matter what, so while we as a nation may suffer they will still live the high life. Check out how much money the Obamas actually spent on themselves, their staff and their vacations and taxpayer-funded campaigning since elected to public office. Multiple millions upon millions of dollars!
Thomas Sowell is not only one of the finest columnists in the business, he's a prolific author, a brilliant economist, and he has an incomparable knack for simplifying complex concepts that few other human beings can match. Enjoy the distilled wisdom!
25) "Since this is an era when many people are concerned about 'fairness' and 'social justice,' what is your 'fair share' of what someone else has worked for?"
24) "Imagine a political system so radical as to promise to move more of the poorest 20% of the population into the richest 20% than remain in the poorest bracket within the decade? You don't need to imagine it. It's called the United States of America."
23) "Four things have almost invariably followed the imposition of controls to keep prices below the level they would reach under supply and demand in a free market: (1) increased use of the product or service whose price is controlled, (2) Reduced supply of the same product or service, (3) quality deterioration, (4) black markets."
22) "What sense would it make to classify a man as handicapped because he is in a wheelchair today, if he is expected to be walking again in a month and competing in track meets before the year is out? Yet Americans are given ‘class’ labels on the basis of their transient location in the income stream. If most Americans do not stay in the same broad income bracket for even a decade, their repeatedly changing 'class' makes class itself a nebulous concept."
21) "There are few talents more richly rewarded with both wealth and power, in countries around the world, than the ability to convince backward people that their problems are caused by other people who are more advanced."
20) "The poverty rate among black married couples has been in single digits ever since 1994. You would never learn that from most of the media. Similarly you look at those blacks that have gone on to college or finished college, the incarceration rate is some tiny fraction of what it is among those blacks who have dropped out of high school. So it’s not being black; it’s a way of life. Unfortunately, the way of life is being celebrated not only in rap music, but among the intelligentsia, is a way of life that leads to a lot of very big problems for most people."
19) "The first lesson of economics is scarcity: there is never enough of anything to fully satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics."
18) "Each new generation born is in effect an invasion of civilization by little barbarians, who must be civilized before it is too late."
17) "The vision of the anointed is one in which ills as poverty, irresponsible sex, and crime derive primarily from 'society,' rather than from individual choices and behavior. To believe in personal responsibility would be to destroy the whole special role of the anointed, whose vision casts them in the role of rescuers of people treated unfairly by 'society'."
16) "No one will really understand politics until they understand that politicians are not trying to solve our problems. They are trying to solve their own problems — of which getting elected and re-elected are number one and number two. Whatever is number three is far behind."
15) "Life has many good things. The problem is that most of these good things can be gotten only by sacrificing other good things. We all recognize this in our daily lives. It is only in politics that this simple, common sense fact is routinely ignored."
14) "There is usually only a limited amount of damage that can be done by dull or stupid people. For creating a truly monumental disaster, you need people with high IQs."
13) "Civilization has been aptly called a 'thin crust over a volcano.' The anointed are constantly picking at that crust."
12) "We seem to be moving steadily in the direction of a society where no one is responsible for what he himself did, but we are all responsible for what somebody else did, either in the present or in the past."
11)” For the anointed, traditions are likely to be seen as the dead hand of the past, relics of a less enlightened age, and not as the distilled experience of millions who faced similar human vicissitudes before.”
10) "It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong."
9) "Intellect is not wisdom."
8)” The charge is often made against the intelligentsia and other members of the anointed that their theories and the policies based on them lack common sense. But the very commonness of common sense makes it unlikely to have any appeal to the anointed. How can they be wiser and nobler than everyone else while agreeing with everyone else?"
7) "Much of the social history of the Western world, over the past three decades, has been a history of replacing what worked with what sounded good."
6) "Experience trumps brilliance."
5) "The problem isn't that Johnny can't read. The problem isn't even that Johnny can't think. The problem is that Johnny doesn't know what thinking is; he confuses it with feeling."
4) "One of the consequences of such notions as ‘entitlements’ is that people who have contributed nothing to society feel that society owes them something, apparently just for being nice enough to grace us with their presence."
3) "Weighing benefits against costs is the way most people make decisions — and the way most businesses make decisions, if they want to stay in business. Only in government is any benefit, however small, considered to be worth any cost, however large."
2) "In short, killing the goose that lays the golden egg is a viable political strategy, so long as the goose does not die before the next election and no one traces the politicians’ fingerprints on the murder weapon."
1) "There are no solutions; there are only trade-offs."
Last weekend we wanted to visit our oldest daughter's family and they had moved to a new location, still less than an hour away but a place we had not seen. She had sent an email with specific instructions but I missed in the the mass of emails I have to sift through during each day. So we turned to an online map site to give us the directions. She was sure I had the email and I was not worried about finding the house because my wife had the cellphone.
First the way I mapped out was not a good idea as an accident had blocked the interstate. We saw that it was a huge line of unmoving traffic in time to get off the interstate onto an ordinary highway. So at that point the map was not as useful. However, I was sure once I found the highway close to their new place we would be fine.
Before gas prices were high, in my youth, I would purposely get lost whenever moving to a new town or city and find my way back. I would do this going North, South, East and West. I learned how to get around every area from all over with the exception of Washington, DC, which was apparently designed to lose people in the suburban regions for hours. DC has streets like spokes of a wheel, streets in a grid and random roads that cut through and occasionally dead end at a park or memorial.
So I was driving in grid fashion, moving North until hitting a barrier, then East or West until I found another good route North and finally wound up on the highway that would lead us close to the new house.
However, as we were back on the map we soon found that the map was wrong and the road ended before reaching their house. We made it up to the 500's and their address was in the 600's. It was at this point that my wife realized she'd left the cell phone at home and we could not call for directions. We spent an hour driving everywhere in the vicinity trying to find that last block of missing street with no success. I took us to a local gas station where I thought perhaps someone might have some idea of the area or perhaps there was that now-rarely-found pay phone? Fortunately one of the girls at the pay counter offered the company phone to us. My daughter gave us final directions.
However, their road was so disguised that they made the decision to walk out to the nearest intersection to walk us to their place. My son-in-law certainly picked a great place to live if you wish to avoid house-to-house salesmen, although I hope the fire department could find it. Their road looks like a driveway for another home. You would never think it led to a property farther in! The only relative I have had with a harder place to find lived on an unmarked gravel road far out in the country officially, but if you found it you would not see his place. You had turn into the driveway of a farmhouse, pass the farmhouse and go through three different cattle gates (keeping an eye out for the cows) and then take a hidden serpentine drive over and down a river bluff to a property that nobody would ever think was there! His backyard was a creek that fed into a river, he had two small houses built up on the side of the bluff and a shiny silver Airstream trailer in which he lived. He had electric and phone and television cable hookups leading down from the bluff. Once a flood swooped up his trailer and deposited it many miles downstream and he was able to retrieve and remodel it to his satisfaction.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Our country once had a roadmap for success. We call it the Constitution. But much like my trip to my daughter's house, the nation got off the interstate (Constitutional government) and has been wandering around turning one way and another while trying to incorporate Socialism into a free society. Right now our nation, the USA, is like we were after a long time driving around lost - we do not know where we are and we cannot see where we are going but we cannot continue to wander around lost for long. The White House has a plan for us and it looks much like the plans that Lenin and Mao and Hitler and Castro and other dictators have used. Demonize the people who are productive, convince those without that they deserve what others have and then leverage them to put themselves into a position of power that is difficult to dislodge.
Barack Obama's regime is quite possibly the end of the road for the USA unless we get help in the form of better information to save us from the natural end of Socialism - tyranny. Whether it is labeled Fascism or Socialism or Communism, the concept of the collectivist State is flawed because it naturally leads to a mass of serfs ruled by a small, rich set of elites. Barack Obama is simply the face of a Statist movement, one whose school records have been protected by millions of dollars in court costs and attorney fees, a man who has no birth certificate that has not been altered, one who once claimed to be a native of Kenya and was at one time a citizen of Indonesia. When away from his teleprompter he is a continual source of malapropism and mispronunciations. He is the product of smooth speechwriters and the American need to absolve itself of a racist past. Funny how it was the Democrats who invented Jim Crow laws and the Republicans who led the fight for racial equality and yet it is the Democrats who have figured out how to keep the poor dependent upon government and unlikely to achieve success, thus reaping their votes...along with a few grateful dead folks.
Sad that politicians in this country have convinced enough people that the government is supposed to take care of them rather than simply protect their right to take care of themselves, that it is meant to provide for basic needs rather than provide for opportunity to be successful and that it is in control of the people rather than being the servants of the people. With bad science, re-written history and disastrous philosophies the Elites always are the enemies of the Free and tyranny is always willing to use the Big Lie to fool the foolish.
Just look at the 2012 American election. Big cities got Obama elected. He got about 60% of the young vote (inexperienced people having been indoctrinated by the public schools but not yet having graduated the college of hard knocks). Otherwise it was the cities, dominated by Democrat machine politics in conjunction with Union bosses and a few generations of the poor who have been convinced they deserve a paycheck for existing and prefer the paltry handouts of government than the opportunities to succeed at something, in part because they have been taught to value the wrong things.
Our society rewards women for having children outside of wedlock. It rewards poor people with a subsistence paycheck. It makes for fatherless children and bad schools with dropouts that are not even recognized. How many schools claim attendees that never show up for class in order to get their share of tax dollars? It encourages crime by therefore making the inner cities the perfect environments for organized crime and black market activities that avoid all taxation or oversight. Ironically there is a bit of freedom and capitalism within the black market that government does not touch because it does not see it.
Tip of the hat to Jonathan Sarfati for cluing me in to this column, below. Pay special attention to the top ten. Sadly it is true that school children are no longer taught how to think critically but rather simply told what to think and believe. Sad also that the politicians making the decisions that bankrupt the nation make sure they get theirs no matter what, so while we as a nation may suffer they will still live the high life. Check out how much money the Obamas actually spent on themselves, their staff and their vacations and taxpayer-funded campaigning since elected to public office. Multiple millions upon millions of dollars!
The 25 Best Quotes From Thomas Sowell
Authored by John Hawkins.Thomas Sowell is not only one of the finest columnists in the business, he's a prolific author, a brilliant economist, and he has an incomparable knack for simplifying complex concepts that few other human beings can match. Enjoy the distilled wisdom!
25) "Since this is an era when many people are concerned about 'fairness' and 'social justice,' what is your 'fair share' of what someone else has worked for?"
24) "Imagine a political system so radical as to promise to move more of the poorest 20% of the population into the richest 20% than remain in the poorest bracket within the decade? You don't need to imagine it. It's called the United States of America."
23) "Four things have almost invariably followed the imposition of controls to keep prices below the level they would reach under supply and demand in a free market: (1) increased use of the product or service whose price is controlled, (2) Reduced supply of the same product or service, (3) quality deterioration, (4) black markets."
22) "What sense would it make to classify a man as handicapped because he is in a wheelchair today, if he is expected to be walking again in a month and competing in track meets before the year is out? Yet Americans are given ‘class’ labels on the basis of their transient location in the income stream. If most Americans do not stay in the same broad income bracket for even a decade, their repeatedly changing 'class' makes class itself a nebulous concept."
21) "There are few talents more richly rewarded with both wealth and power, in countries around the world, than the ability to convince backward people that their problems are caused by other people who are more advanced."
20) "The poverty rate among black married couples has been in single digits ever since 1994. You would never learn that from most of the media. Similarly you look at those blacks that have gone on to college or finished college, the incarceration rate is some tiny fraction of what it is among those blacks who have dropped out of high school. So it’s not being black; it’s a way of life. Unfortunately, the way of life is being celebrated not only in rap music, but among the intelligentsia, is a way of life that leads to a lot of very big problems for most people."
19) "The first lesson of economics is scarcity: there is never enough of anything to fully satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics."
18) "Each new generation born is in effect an invasion of civilization by little barbarians, who must be civilized before it is too late."
17) "The vision of the anointed is one in which ills as poverty, irresponsible sex, and crime derive primarily from 'society,' rather than from individual choices and behavior. To believe in personal responsibility would be to destroy the whole special role of the anointed, whose vision casts them in the role of rescuers of people treated unfairly by 'society'."
16) "No one will really understand politics until they understand that politicians are not trying to solve our problems. They are trying to solve their own problems — of which getting elected and re-elected are number one and number two. Whatever is number three is far behind."
15) "Life has many good things. The problem is that most of these good things can be gotten only by sacrificing other good things. We all recognize this in our daily lives. It is only in politics that this simple, common sense fact is routinely ignored."
14) "There is usually only a limited amount of damage that can be done by dull or stupid people. For creating a truly monumental disaster, you need people with high IQs."
13) "Civilization has been aptly called a 'thin crust over a volcano.' The anointed are constantly picking at that crust."
12) "We seem to be moving steadily in the direction of a society where no one is responsible for what he himself did, but we are all responsible for what somebody else did, either in the present or in the past."
11)” For the anointed, traditions are likely to be seen as the dead hand of the past, relics of a less enlightened age, and not as the distilled experience of millions who faced similar human vicissitudes before.”
10) "It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong."
9) "Intellect is not wisdom."
8)” The charge is often made against the intelligentsia and other members of the anointed that their theories and the policies based on them lack common sense. But the very commonness of common sense makes it unlikely to have any appeal to the anointed. How can they be wiser and nobler than everyone else while agreeing with everyone else?"
7) "Much of the social history of the Western world, over the past three decades, has been a history of replacing what worked with what sounded good."
6) "Experience trumps brilliance."
5) "The problem isn't that Johnny can't read. The problem isn't even that Johnny can't think. The problem is that Johnny doesn't know what thinking is; he confuses it with feeling."
4) "One of the consequences of such notions as ‘entitlements’ is that people who have contributed nothing to society feel that society owes them something, apparently just for being nice enough to grace us with their presence."
3) "Weighing benefits against costs is the way most people make decisions — and the way most businesses make decisions, if they want to stay in business. Only in government is any benefit, however small, considered to be worth any cost, however large."
2) "In short, killing the goose that lays the golden egg is a viable political strategy, so long as the goose does not die before the next election and no one traces the politicians’ fingerprints on the murder weapon."
1) "There are no solutions; there are only trade-offs."
