Sewage by any other name....

Wasn't going to write about this, except that I've heard about it from at least a half-dozen sources over the last 24 hours... That's the new crap-n-tax bill, called "The American Power Bill," sponsored by Kerry and Lieberman. Apparently they think we won't recognize this crap if they dress it up and rename it.

Briefly, from what I understand, it promises to raise the price of gasoline to about $10 per gallon and otherwise destroy life as we know it.

Of course, the dems will flock to it. I'm sure Pazzo Pelosi is four-square behind it. Anything that will help to destroy the USA will have her enthusiastic (though nutsy) endorsement.

Do we need this? Do we citizens continually have to battle the idiots in Washington? Why the hell don't they just leave us alone?

Everything they do only makes things much, much worse.

I'm just so sick and tired of it.

Laissez-faire! That means, literal translation from French:  Leave us alone!

Louis XVI didn't listen, and look what happened to him. And the silly-ass big-spending queen he rode in on.

In defense of history

I shouldn't continue to criticize History Channel's "Story of Us." I'm not opposed to it, really. It might inspire an interest in history in those who think it's a cold, dead topic. It's not. It's really fun. It's a drama, full of unbelievable achievements, blood-curdling terror, and colorful people. But "The Story of Us" just kinda turns this wonderful rainbow into a gray blur.

Had to watch the Civil War episode because I really do know quite a bit about the Civil War. I can use that as a way to gauge the historical accuracy. The program got the technology right, most of the time, and how it helped the Union war effort. Something they overlooked in talking about the "industrialized" North vs. the "agricultural" South (both were vastly more agricultural than industrial) is that the Yankees liked machines because in the North, labor was expensive. Not a problem in the slave South.

Wish I could say the battles and the significance of the Civil War were recounted with better accuracy. Seems that show's researchers spent some time poring over SCV (Sons of Confederate Veterans) web sites, actually read a little bit about Stonewall in the Valley and 2nd Manassas, then figured, "Oh to hell with it. That's enough to fill up 10 minutes."

Had to chuckle at the show's proclaiming that Ulysses S. Grant's major accomplishment as general of the Union Army was appointing W.T. Sherman to head up the Army of the West. I'm laughing at that right now, though Sherman is one of my favorite characters. And the show confused the Atlanta Campaign with the March to the Sea. Two different things employing two different tactics, driven by two different purposes.

What? No Peninsula Campaign? No Chancellorsville? No Gettysburg? No Vicksburg or Richmond Campaign? No. Only Sherman pillaging the countryside on the way to Atlanta -- which didn't happen, by the way. It's about 100 miles from Chattanooga to Atlanta, and it took Sherman something like five months to cross that ground. He built railroads and bridges as he went -- or rebuilt them after the rebs tore them up behind them as they retreated. Matter of fact, Sherman gave his engineers (not railroad engineers, but construction engineers) a large part of the credit for his survival en route to Atlanta. There's even a pretty famous joke:

"How'd Sherman get across the river?"

"He took the bridge."

"Where'd he get a bridge? We burnt that bridge."

"He brought it with him."

The railroads between Atlanta and the sea were a different matter. That's where "Sherman"s hairpins" and "Sherman's bow-ties" came into play -- rails torn up and twisted around trees and so forth. And not just bent, because they could be straightened, but twisted, so they couldn't be used again for track. And without a railroad, Sherman licensed "living off the land." His army didn't burn crops in the field. First of all, it was November-December and there weren't any crops in the field. Second, he wouldn't burn the crops when he needed them to feed his army. His army left Atlanta (smoldering, so it couldn't serve as base for any rebs coming up behind him) with about a week's rations. It took about six weeks to get to Savannah, and then he had to win Savannah, or at least convince it to surrender.

And historian Al Sharpton commenting on how the Emancipation Proclamation made slaves equal? No, not really. Even with emancipation, slaves weren't quite citizens and couldn't vote except in a few states that allowed it. They were allowed to join the US Army, though, and did fight valiantly most of the time. For their "ingratitude," they were especially targeted by the Confederates, and if they survived capture, they were sold back into slavery.  But believe it was the 15th Amendment, a few years after the Civil War, that granted citizenship to blacks and former slaves. That was part of Reconstruction, which doesn't seem to have occurred at all in "The Story of Us."

Then the thing about killing all the buffalo... Yeah, to make belts for weaving looms in Lowell, Mass. OK. But nothing at all said about Sherman and Sheridan regarding the deliberate anihilation of the buffalo herds as a very effective way of starving the Sioux and Cheyenne into dependency on the government. The show regarded that as a by-product of the buffalo slaughter, never mentioned it as one of its causes. I do believe it was Sheridan who said, "The only good Indian is a dead one," or something to that effect.

Custer got very short shrift, too, and he probably deserved it. But Custer was not quite as stupid as the program suggests. Nearly so, but not quite....

I'm glad they talked about the black cowboys, though. Wonder if they'll bring up the Buffalo Soldiers? And you know, the word "buckaroo," meaning "cowboy", comes from the Spanish "vacarro," which I probably didn't spell right, but that also means "cowboy". Just about everything the cowboys knew they learned from Mexican vacarros -- going way back to before the Mexican War.

I was rather peeved at this person named Jeanette Wall or Waller or something, who apologized for gun ownership in the New World by claiming it had something to do with a determination to take care of yourself. Just a silly kinda macho thing we don't need to take too seriously.

OK. Number One, if you couldn't take care of yourself in the New World, you didn't survive. That simple. It's not like you could order take-out. The New World, and especially the Great Plains, were way short of grocery stores. If you couldn't shoot or trap your dinner, you didn't get much to eat. Number Two, snakes, bears, and a range of other predators. Number Three, by the time the white settlers were moving west in droves, the Indians were a real threat, along with assorted bandits who took refuge from the law in the West, thieves and cutthroats of all kinds. People who wouldn't think twice about killing you for your horse.

And, hey, about horses. They keep showing these pioneer wagons being drawn by horses. The army didn't even use that many horses -- or not as many horses as mules. And the pioneers, if they brought a horse, it was a dray to pull the plow when and where they settled. Horses were too delicate and skittish and the Indians would steal them. For the Plains Indians, horses were like their bank accounts.

The pioneers used oxen. You tried to start with about a dozen oxen -- a couple of teams -- and most of them would be dead for one reason or another by the time you reached the Parting of the Ways, just the other side of the Rockies. Horses would never survive that trip hauling the cargo the pioneers were carrying. And you don't sit on the wagon box to drive oxen. You walk beside them with a long bull whip. Only the sick, the feeble, maybe little kids and pregnant women near the time of birth rode in the wagons. The wagons were for hauling food, tools, and furniture, and you didn't exhaust the animals by loading them up with people who could move on their own. Didn't carry much water, either -- way too heavy. You had to follow the rivers.

They didn't use Conestogas, which were the 18-wheelers of the day, used mainly on the Santa Fe and Cimarron and other southern trails, initially to supply the US Army during the Mexican War. The Conestogas were way too big and heavy to negotiate the mountains and river crossings on the Oregon-California Trail. You needed like ten or twelve mules to pull a Conestoga, and that livestock had to eat. The pioneers used plain old farm wagons most of the time. The Reeds, one family in the Donner Party, had a special double-decker wagon made for the trip, but most people just used farm wagons. Many people, especially during the Gold Rush, abandoned their wagons at Fort Laramie when most of their supplies were gone, and packed mules the rest of the way, through the mountains.

And you left in May, April was too early for the grass you needed to support your stock, and you tried to arrive early September at the latest. Think you could walk from around Kansas City to the Pacific Coast in that time?  With no McDonalds or Applebee's, no Holiday Inns or Motel Sixes.

If you want to know about the real history, you've got to dig a little deeper. All I'm saying is there's a lot more to "The Story of Us" than has been included so far. It's missing all the texture.

One pretty positive thing about the show -- it makes it plain that building the USA was not a federal project. It was done by individuals. Some pretty tough and sometimes pretty goofy individuals who just wanted to be free, or rich, or something. In the first wave of immigration across the Mississippi in the 1840s, there was a saying that if you could go to your farthest field and scream and anyone could hear you, the neighborhood was just getting too crowded. Apart from establishing the borders, and holding the whole thing together during the Civil War, the government didn't have much to do with the actual hands-on building of the USA at all.

The most beneficial thing the feds did for the nation was to stay out of the way of citizens as much as possible. Just about every time the feds got involved, there was corruption and fraud -- like Credit Mobile, which "The Story of Us" didn't mention. It was a scheme to raise money to fund the transcontinental railway. Certain people were authorized by the feds to form a corporation and sell stock and such; mostly those in charge spent whatever they got on big cigars and lobbying, then absconded with whatever was left. It was a huge scandal. A precursor to Modern Times.

Anyway, it was limited government and the resulting personal liberty -- hungry people free to get a living the best way they could -- that built this country from zippo to the most developed and prosperous in the world.

The mind-boggling advantages of just letting people do things for themselves is one of history's best lessons. Ambition, imagination, starvation -- that's what the USA is made on. And all of that is largely shoved aside as anti-social in the eat-your-brother syndrome of the welfare state. So if "The Story of Us" does anything to promote the amazing value of personal liberty, it's not all bad. It's a start, anyway.

Legacy from my mom

Today is Mothers' Day.

My mother died several years ago. She was getting dementia and had a stroke, which made the dementia worse, as well as paralyzing one side of her body. She spent the last few years in a nursing home because she required professional care. Don't want to go too much into that...

Funny, I have this very acute memory. Friends of mine rely on me to recall events from their own lives and I usually can. Like, I remember being in a crib, with my sister, a year older than me, poking her fingers through the bars to torment me. That relationship never changed....

Anyway, I remember one day -- musta been summer -- being out in the back yard with Mom. She had been doing laundry in the basement with one of those wringer washers, then hanging it out on clotheslines in the back yard to dry. It always smelled so good after it dried. And this just a couple miles outside of a major American metropolis and decades before EPA protection.

So we had this enormous oak tree in the backyard. That house has been torn down for 40 years at least and an apartment building stands there now. There's still a big dip in the parking lot -- site of that old oak tree.

I was walking around the oak tree. Around and around the oak tree -- don't know why -- as Mom was pinning wet sheets and stuff on the clothesline.

OK.  Then there's Dad, who was a rabid Roosevelt democrat. He used to get in heated arguments all the time with one of my uncles, who apparently was a rabid Republican. We lived in a mostly-Republican suburb of Chicago, and my dad used to run for local office as a democrat, just so the Republican would have some opposition. Dad died when I was 11 years old, and my teacher at school at the time told me she'd been proud to have a member of my family in her class. I was unaware at the time that anyone knew my dad outside of the immediate family.  But I digress.

My dad was very into politics, an avid TV news watcher, avid newspaper reader. Another one of my uncles, who I believe was, like Dad, rather more sympathetic to the dems than the Reps, had this real disgust for people who didn't keep aware of politics, even though he'd been a bootlegger during Prohibition and did time for it. So above my head was an ogoing political discussion all the time.

So I was about five years old, out in the yard with Mom, her hanging laundry, me walking around and around the oak tree. And I asked her, "Mom, what's the government?"

Ike was in office then. No idea what any of that had to do with any of us.

She said, "The people. The people are the government."

That didn't seem to make any sense and she wouldn't explain. I clearly recall my frustration. Set me on a rather tortured and twisted path.

Save the republc.

Dick Durbin's vision of the future

A little while back, after muscling socialist health care legislation through congress, Dick(head) Durbin, US Senator from Illinois -- senator of my state, but don't blame me, I never voted for him -- said that passing that crap legislation will secure a dem victory in upcoming elections because citizens won't be willing to give up their health care benefits. That is to say, once we all snuggle up nice and cozy with the nanny state, we'll never want to cut the apron strings.

You mean like Greece?

Been watching the riots in Greece. Apparently the rabid crowds blew up a bank or something. Like a bank -- any bank -- could be the source of their problems. 'Course, given the ignorant and childishly simplistic world-view of most socialists, they probably believe that banks are the source of money and wealth. No. Banks are more like hotels for the money that's been created by bank customers. Then the banks pimp that money out to make their own profits, and their profits are really pretty marginal and underwhelming, if they're honest.

Anyway, it seems the Greeks have all become so accustomed to sucking the public tit, they resent the hell out of the idea of having to work for a living. They certainly can't blame themselves for failure, so they attack the banks. Pretty shameful. Worse, their credit has run out and they have to go hat in hand to the IMF, begging for charity. From nations who aren't much better off, and who demand that Greece behaves more responsibly.

So Greek citizens stage a mass temper tantrum and burn down buildings and fight with each other. Does that work? Does that solve the problem? Does that make them any money to pay their own freight?

But I guess this is Dick(head) Durbin's lofty vision of the future of the USA. We'll all become so used to dependency and being owned by the federal government that if it threatens to deny us any goodies, we'll go into fits of rage, like a spoiled brat in a toy store.

Boy, that's something to look forward to, isn't it? Doesn't that just fill you with a sense of pride and self-respect? I'm broke. Let me go set fire to something and beat someone up.

Good grief. How would you like to live inside of Durbin's head with that kind of an outlook? What a genuine horror show that must be. He just assumes we're all sociopaths. No wonder he's so hot to try to control us and run our lives. Really scary world he lives in. Uncivilized.

Then I saw this guy named Mike Norman on Neil Cavuto. I couldn't believe this Norman guy. He looks like a grown-up. He's at least the size of Neil Cavuto and his voice has changed. But apparently he has a lasting and unshakeable faith in Santa Claus, and especially the federal-government-as-Santa-Claus.

So I googled Mike Norman and found something called "Mike Norman Is An Idiot." He sure is. Happy to know I'm not alone in my assessment.

Here, back to Economics 101. The government does not create wealth. The government can print money.... I was going to say "mint" money, but it can't mint money unless it owns some valuable metal, which it doesn't anymore. Most of the stuff in Fort Knox belongs to other people. We're just babysitting it. I believe it was Nixon who decided to entirely sever the value of the US dollar from anything real and let it "float" on the international currency market. So it's only paper and a promise, and the promise has proven to be pretty much of a crock in the hands of legislators hell-bent on bribing citizens to vote for them.

At any rate, the government does not produce anything. Every single service the government provides could be provided by a private citizen or company. It's just more convenient and much more orderly for a society or culture to grant its legislative and judicial authority to a single organization -- a government. We pay for that with our taxes. All the government does is create laws and enforce them. That's it. How much of that do you want to pay for? How much has any value for you?

Some of law is worthwhile. I'm not an anarchist. I'd happily support a police force and a military, but the EPA? Not so much. And when a government starts forcing you to pay for services you don't want or need -- what do you call that? Especially when the government has the authority to force you to pay for it. The tail begins wagging the dog. Eventually you end up with some kind of totalitarian nightmare that serves only a handful of tyrants at the expense of all other citizens. That's slavery no matter how you look at it.

So anyway, this Mike Norman person, like Dick(head) Durbin, and like the Comrade, doesn't seem to understand that value needs to be something more than good intentions. (Or maybe, not-so-good intentions.) You can't just dream up a treasury. Not even socialists, not even the Comrade, has been able to do that, though the Comrade seems to continue to believe that "Yes! I can!"

You can make all kinds of promises and borrow the money to pay for it -- for a while. But when the bill comes due in an idiotic socialist nation, like Greece, you end up with people killing each other. It's happened over and over and over again throughout history, and every couple generations, we get some new get-rich-quick scheme from some butthead like Karl Marx or John Kennth Galbraith.

Better we should hang onto to our liberties, each pay our own way, and respect others' right to do the same.

Save the republic. Preserve and promote capitalism and free enterprise. And by "free," I mean "unregulated" by anything but the common sense of every individual for and by him/herself.

The privilege of citizenship

Very briefly because I'm very busy and woke up late....

Fox is reporting that someone in congress is introducing a bill that would strip people of US citizenship, apparently if they blow up buildings and/or leave flammable SUV's in Times Square.

But is stripping them of their citizenship a bad thing for them?

I mean, without citizenship, they'll qualify for free health care and other benefits, and they'll be able to move across the borders completely unimpeded, no? As a matter of fact, if anyone tries to stop their crossing the borders whenever and wherever they please, the Comrade's regime will call up thousands of protesters to protect their "right" to do so, no? And they can bring whole gangs of thugs with them, controlled substances in large quantities, and any kind of weapons. They can shoot the locals with no retribution, shoot the cops, etc. etc. Hey, it's like they died and went to heaven.

So I'd say terrorists and other related wannabes are probably better off without US citizenship.

Being an American citizen just means you're liable to pay your "fair" share of the $14 TRILLION debt congress has squandered on, among other things, subsidizing non-citizens.

And a note on the debt.... Greece just voted to cut back its budget. Rioting in the streets, etc. What a bunch of idiots. Where do the rioters think their government is going to get the money to support their lazy lifestyles? The Greeks are just stupid. And a grievous reminder of how to turn proud people into dependents and slaves of the state.

Does the White House "get it" yet?

It's 2:00 am on Tuesday, May 3 here. Fox has been exhaustively repeating -- I mean reporting --  on the US Attorney General's middle-of-the-night announcement that they've arrested a US citizen with a Pakistani background for planting the exploding SUV in Times Square on Saturday night. Saw parts of AG Hold'em's statement. He seems about as braindead as Janet Napolitano, who seems to have such a hard time staying awake. Thank God for the NYPD. Hold'em suggested that Faisal Shazzam! (shades of Gomer Pyle) or whatever the arrested's name is, is actually a... well... a... gulp... "terrorist." He's trying to kill Americans.

OMG! Someone call the police!

So Fox is waking up all their commentators and reporters asking them why Hold'em is making this announcement in the middle of the night.

Apparently Hold'em wants to impress us all that the White House is finally convinced that "terrorists" truly do exist.

Do ya think? Next they'll be claiming that Iran is seriously developing an atom bomb. (Abracadabrajab was haranguing about that all day at the UN, but I'm sure the Comrade will just charm the pants off him and get him to change his mind about wiping Israel off the face of the earth.)

Perhaps, like Van Jones, right up until this moment, Hold'em and the rest of the merry marxists thought it really was George Bush who blew up the Twin Towers in a major power grab. After all, they probably would have.

But no... Hey, maybe there really is an al-Qaeda trying to kill Americans. Or a Taliban, or someone. Spooky.

What a bummer, huh? Maybe they better lock the guy up, what do you think?

Shazzam! was arrested at JFK airport as he was boarding a plane for Dubai. Oh dear, hope they didn't do any profiling in tracking this guy down. Maybe he looks like an Middle Easterner. Oh-oh -- there goes any chance of conviction at trial. I mean, you don't want to actually suggest that a Middle Eastern-looking person would be involved in anything like al-Qaeda or the Taliban. We must be fair. Hope they searched a few Swedes and Icelanders while they were at it.

They did read Shazzam! his rights. Think they'll maybe question him? No... better get him a lawyer. Maybe from Hold'em's former law firm doing their fair share of pro bono work. They seem to sympathize with people who are somehow vaguely connected to "man-made disasters." Especially when they happen in the United States.

What a damn circus, know what I mean?

And again, thank God for the NYPD. Deep in my heart, I don't believe the feds had anything to do with it.

Louisiana hit again

Poor Louisiana. The oil spill looks like a big and long-lasting mess.

Just wish I could believe it was all accidental, coming so closely on the heels of the Comrade's oh-so-generous announcement that he would "allow" people to think about drilling in the USA. So big of you, Comrade, to bless the obvious necessity. But who really needs you, anyway?

Anyone but me wondering if the Comrade counts himself among the number of those who have "made enough money"? Exactly how much is "enough," Comrade? I'm sure you have all the answers. And I'm sure you need much more money than most other people, being a step above all of us unwashed proletariat, right?

Look, it's late. I'm tired. I'm oh so tired of the crap coming out of Washington. Specifically the White House.

Worried about America and genuinely afraid of the underhanded and power-grabbing tactics of this regime.

And I can picture very clearly the scene from last Monday: Carol Brownose, David Axelgrease, and Ram Emanuel, all in black, faces smeared with camo paint, paddling a small rubber boat into the pitch black of the Gulf at midnight, and all of them wielding Bic lighters. The waves lap against the sides of the boat. The half moon disguises their tedious but determined progress toward the targeted oil platform....

Is this the Reichstag Fire yet? Are the buttheads still trying to sell crap-n-tax? Or trying to resurrect it?

It would be so nice to be able to trust someone in government again. Or at least trust that they're merely stupid, rather than stupid and evil.

And why did the Republicans decide to allow debate on the terrible dem financial regulation bill? Do the Republicans honestly believe that they can make some difference in it? Or, for that matter, that they can regulate better?

Funny... Happened across two of the three debates the Brits have been having for their upcoming election. This involves three parties: Conservative, Liberal, and Labor. Gordon Brown, current P.M., is Labor. David Cameron is Conservative, and there's this other guy trying to act like Obama who's the Liberal. He's a good speaker, young and enthusiastic, and a total socialist loony. In England, socialism is pretty acceptable and accepted. After all, they had George Bernard Shaw and John Maynard Keynes.

It's rather horrible listening to the debate. They discuss how they will carve up the U.K., what kinds of benefits their subjects will get, how much they'll have to pay in taxes, etc. And the people -- the subjects -- just sit there and take it in stride. They're in total compliance, but through most of their history, they always have been. Sort of starved into submission.

They don't have a Constitution like ours -- that is, written -- and I'm not overly impressed with the Magna Carta, though I guess it was a start. It was possibly the first thing written in Europe that tried to limit the powers of a monarch.

Anyway, thought it was interesting that the Conservative is in the lead in the polls. He would not be "conservative" in the USA, but for England I guess it's a start.

Also read somewhere that England is having tea parties -- I mean like ours, but rather more civilized. And they might actually involve the drinking of tea. Anyone else see any irony in that?

Got in a discussion with some Brits once about politics. You know, it was the USA that ruined the Empire via lend-lease in the early days of WWII, he said. OK. Like they could keep all their colonies and defeat Hitler at the same time. England might have done it, though. All of England is about the size of Illinois, and look what kind of an impact the Brits have had over history.

Then this other Brit asked if I knew whether or not it's true that Americans mostly prefers coffee to tea because of events in Boston Harbor. It's a possibility. Also, coffee is grown in South America while tea came from China. That might have had something to do with it, too.

Anyway, I need some sleep.

And I stand with Steven Hawking:  I don't believe the aliens are friendly and want to help us. I think it's probably more like that Twilight Zone episode, "To Serve Man." It's a cook book!