Laigle’s Forum

Are corporations torch bearers of the free market?

Not even close – despite what the “conservative” media and politicians are telling you

 

Don Hank

There is a certain resistance among the public to admit that it is not you and I but the corporations and their lawyers, partnering with the Federal Reserve, that run America. Many conservatives hate to hear anyone “malign” corporations because to them, corporations, including banks, bear the torch of sacred capitalism. The GOP bosses are content with this situation.

On the other hand, since most big corporations donate mostly to the Democrat party, Democrats — especially those in the media and politics – are also loathe to broach the subject of corporate control over government.

Besides, the same corporations lobbying for open borders and amnesty for illegal aliens are also helping build Democrat power. Everyone knows how Latinos tend to vote.

And when it comes to “green” boondoggles, all the fat cats want in on them. They will of course mean a net loss of jobs and enormous subsidies for the most inefficient technologies known to mankind, but “green” subsidies flow freely from government coffers, as anyone following the Solyndra story knows.

Now, many of these corporate lobbyists are pushing very hard for open borders. They donated big bucks to pliable candidates and expect some bang, like more illegal alien labor, for example, and better legal conditions for sending your job overseas. Big corporations and Big Politics want precisely what you dread.

So what about us little people down here?

I wonder what people would say if they knew that the power of their vote is negligible compared to the pressures brought to bear by Big Business lobbies, which effectively dictate policy to your elected officials. I wonder how many have ever figured out that it was your senator’s and congressmen’s utter subservience to corporate lobbyists that made them vote for the TARP bailouts even after receiving phone calls begging them not to vote for it at the rate of 300 calls against the bailouts per 1 call in favor.

I wonder what will happen once the cat is out of the bag.

Maybe We the People will assume our rightful place in this great nation again.

Maybe.

But not unless we put our thinking caps on and realize what is really happening. Try asking yourself honestly: would corporations spend billions of dollars lobbying if they weren’t getting a financial “kickback” in some form or other? And are these kickbacks free or do they cost you money? 

It’s not that long between now and election time. Will your candidate discuss this with you in town meetings or will he mutter something snide, look around and say “next question”? If he isn’t leveling with you on the economy, fire him. You’re his boss and can’t afford another sluggard on your staff.

Where does your presidential candidate stand? I don’t recall the Fox moderators asking about the power of the corporate lobbies. And yet, business as usual in Washington brought down the world economy and cost millions of American jobs.

It’s time to wake up and make the economy and your job the front-burner issue this time around.

DEMAND:

CONGRESSIONAL CONTROL OF THE MONEY (NO MORE FEDERAL RESERVE)

STRICT CONTROLS ON LOBBYING, ESP CORPORATE LOBBYING

Now recall that the mainstream “conservative” media keep reminding you that the Occupy people are all a bunch of Marxists. So what about Alex Jones and Ron Paul’s followers? They aren’t Marxists and they have attended the Occupy rallies in significant numbers all over the country, teaching independents about the issues, making converts. So have people like Steph Jasky and Karl Denninger, who played a key role in founding the Tea Party, as well as a ton of other top-notch people. All while you stayed home, paralyzed with fear by what you read in the “conservative” press and blogosphere about being tainted by the lefties supposedly in charge. Like that photo of a young anarchist backed up against a police car, pants at half-mast, in an act of defiant defecation. Think anyone follows him? All in all, whatever Marxists may be participating in the rallies out in the cities and towns across the country are clueless non-contenders and will have almost no power in this movement if we play our cards right for a change. As I have said before, the movement is ours for the taking. Why do you think the Republican leaders and their minions in Big Talk Radio are all bad mouthing the movement?

Clue: Many of these people on the street are on to the lobbying games that the corporations – as well as the Fed — are playing, and threaten to spoil things for Big Politics by returning the power to you.

That is the main factor in all the negative press on the right. So why do leftwing politicians high five these young protesters? That’s easy. So far, they’ve been smarter than us. They know they can control the movement and its narrative if they act like they are behind it all. But they’re bluffing.  Yes, ACORN, Soros, Van Jones and other shadowy types with Obama links have in fact dreamed up schemes like this and undoubtedly had a hand in it, just as they no doubt had a hand in the Egyptian riots. But this isn’t Egypt now. It’s our turf, and no one can control it unless we let them. So far, the Left is spinning its wheels as its power slips away. Protesters interviewed on camera, for example, have ripped Obama mercilessly for his failures. The End the Fed movement is all over these rallies and for whatever faults they may have, they are vehemently anti-Obama and pro free market.

So if people like you can start thinking – and acting – outside the box, the whole football can be stripped from the hands of the corporatist elites and, with God’s grace, you can have your country back.

Sure, it will be hard work. And the propaganda aimed at making you think you are in bad company among the protesters will be non-stop. That’s a given.

Some of my Christian brethren are saying that to join the protests would mean being unequally yoked.

But consider this: If a bunch of atheists lobbied to make churches accountable for the actions of pedophile church workers, you wouldn’t side with the pedophiles, would you?

Voting against the pedophiles would not make you an atheist and it would not make you look like one. It would be doing God’s work because pedophiles not only harmd children, they are a stumbling block to the unsaved and give the churches a bad name. Let’s be real: For every candidate you have ever voted for, some unsavory characters also voted for him. So what?

Don’t be afraid to join forces with new people who are starting to get it and are just as mad as you, but maybe don’t have as clear a grasp of the issues. You may be the person who reaches a wishy-washy fence rider.

After all, I can’t think of a single election cycle when people on both sides of the political spectrum have been so mad for the same reasons – irrespective of their ideologies.

What a gorgeous opportunity!

If you let the political elites who stole your country steal the election this time around, don’t blame it on me.

 

Some statistics to consider:

 

http://allthingsd.com/20101223/what-tech-companies-are-spending-in-washington/

 

Verizon spent $3.83 million lobbying on several issues, including taxes and texting while driving, at numerous branches of the federal government, including the White House, Congress, the Internal Revenue Service and the Federal Trade Commission. It spent $2.96 million in the same period a year ago.

AT&T spent $3.47 million, up from $3.18 million a year ago. Its agenda items included legislation on calling cards, broadband buildouts and distracted driving.

Hewlett-Packard spent $1.6 million–nearly double the $970,000 it spent in the third quarter of last year–chatting with members of Congress and officials at the Department of Justice and the Commerce Department about taxes, immigration and how government agencies use technology in the areas of health care and law enforcement.

Microsoft spent $1.63 million, an increase from $1.49 million a year ago. It visited Congress, the Pentagon and the Departments of Commerce and Homeland Security to talk about computer security, how the government buys software and the competitive state of online advertising. It also lobbied the Federal Communications Commission on net neutrality.

Oracle spent $1.6 million, up from $1.3 million, lobbying Congress, the Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security on patent litigation and the government’s technology spending plans.

Google spent $1.2 million in the third quarter (which TechCrunch noted in October following a press release by Consumer Watchdog), an increase from $1.08 million in the same period a year ago.

IBM spent $1 million, up from $850,000 a year ago, talking about transportation, the power grid, funding for research and the military, on visits to Congress and the Departments of Transportation, Defense, and Health and Human Services.

Intel spent $830,000, which is notable because the amount decreased from $1.1 million a year ago. Intel was the target of both a private antitrust lawsuit from rival Advanced Micro Devices and a government antitrust investigation by the Federal Trade Commission, both of which were intensifying in the fall. Both cases have since been settled. Its efforts were in immigration, government research funding and issues related to trademarks and education.

Yahoo spent $540,000, up from $510,000 a year ago.

Apple, easily the most influential company in consumer technology today, spent relatively little on lobbying efforts: Only $340,000 [BUT they had Al Gore on their board of directors. How cozy. 90% of their political donations went to the Democrats. Did you know that Steve Jobs “invented” mostly cosmetic changes in devices? Can you name an inventor who actually devised the really high-tech stuff like the iPod itself or the Apple computer and monitor electronics? Didn’t think so. They didn’t have dinner with Al Gore—Don Hank].

Facebook spent $120,000.

For a little more on what companies spend on lobbying efforts in Washington, it’s always enlightening to peruse the database maintained by the Center for Responsive Politics, which tracks not only lobbying expenditures but campaign contributions.

As you can see, the CRP shows that, among computer and Internet companies, Microsoft was the leading lobbying spender for the first nine months of the year. The wireless industry’s trade association, the CTIA, led the pack in the telephone equipment and services category, spending more than $6 million. Meanwhile, Verizon and AT&T each spent more than $12 million.

http://www.alternet.org/story/146643/hightower:_washington_overrun_by_11,000_corporate_lobbyists_and_$500_million_in_corrupting_donations

• 11,195. That’s the number of corporate lobbyists who are presently plying their nefarious trade day and night in Washington’s hallways and back rooms.
• $2.95 billion. That’s the amount that corporations spent on lobbyists last year alone (a sum more than six times greater than the total spent by all consumer,environmental, worker, and other non-corporate groups combined).
• $473 million. That’s the sum of money that corporate executives and lobbyists have slipped into Washington’s many political pockets–so far–for the 2010 election cycle, including donations to candidates, leadership PACS, and party committees. We are still seven months from the 2010 elections, and already corporate spending has reached the record-breaking total of $475 million shelled out for the entire 2008 cycle.

 

Originally Posted here by Laigle’s contributor Anthony Horvath

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“Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” John Adams

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed Declaration of Independence

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The last few months I’ve seen some strident statements of opposition against libertarians by conservatives. I’m on several email lists where I’m seeing such commentary and of course its on the web, as in this example. I personally didn’t detect a huge uptick in libertarian sentiment, but alright. I describe myself as a ‘constitutional libertarian’ and in explaining why I hope that I can shed light on what I believe are the true reasons for a rise in libertarianism- among Christians in particular. I can’t speak for them all, of course, but I think I recognize in some of their commentary some of my own thinking.

So, to begin with, let me make two important observations. First of all, when one thinks ‘libertarian’ one might immediately think licentious. However, the two are not identical terms. This leads to the second observation, the direction by which one arrives at libertarianism greatly impacts the flavor of that libertarianism. There can be no question that there are a great mass of individuals, who calling themselves libertarians, really are just people who wish to engage in whatever depravity that they want, with no one to tell them otherwise or worse- stop them. By my observation, the people coming from this direction are really your typical atheist secular humanist progressive who is perfectly happy to foist as much government as people can bear onto themselves and others- in the form of nationalized health care, eg- just so long as they can have sex with whatever and whomever they want and smoke whatever happens to come across their path.

However, someone coming at ‘libertarianism’ from the other direction, say, from a Christian perspective and a conservative, is not looking for a reason to misbehave. This is why I led off with the John Adams quote. ‘Moral and religious people’ will continue to be ‘moral and religious’ whatever freedoms or restrictions are placed on them by the government. I might say: “Libertarianism was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the [government] of any other.” There are any number of forms of government that can work with a ‘moral and religious people.’ For an amoral or immoral or anti-moral or non-religious or anti-religious people, no kind of government is going to work for the long haul. Read the rest of this entry »

Oh East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet.

Rudyard Kipling (the Ballad of East and West)

 

by Don Hank

Recently, a quiet philosophical debate took place without media fanfare between Brazilian philosopher Olavo de Carvalho and Alexandr Dugin, Vladimir Putin’s geopolitical strategist and leading organizer of the Eurasian Movement  – considered to be the most influential Russian thinker in the Post-Soviet era. It was a classic clash of East and West.

Both submitted photos of themselves, and no reader could help but be charmed by the kneeling de Carvalho posing with his hunting dogs and shotgun, in contrast to the stern figure of Dugin standing in front of a Russian tank holding a machine gun. One prepared to kill human opponents and the other simply prepared to hunt rabbits or quail.

De Carvalho’s opening remarks are as disarming as the picture:

“I am just a philosopher, writer, and professor, committed to the quest for what seems to me to be the truth and to educating a group of people who are so kind as to pay attention to what I say.  Neither these people nor I hold any public job.  We do not have any influence on national or international politics. We do not even have the ambition – much less an explicit project – for changing the course of history, whatever it may be.  Our only hope is to know reality to the utmost degree of our power and one day leave this life aware that we did not live in illusions and self-delusion, that we did not let ourselves be misled and corrupted by the Prince of this World and by the promises of the ideologues, his servants.  In the current power hierarchy of my native country, my opinion is worthless, except maybe as a negative example and an incarnation of absolute evil[1], which is a source of great satisfaction to me.  In the country where I live, the government considers me at worst an inoffensive eccentric.

“No political party, mass movement, government institution, church or religious sect considers me its mentor. So I can give my opinion as I wish, and change my opinion as many times as it seems right to me, with no devastating practical consequences beyond the modest circle of my personal existence.”

Incredibly, rather than try to assert that he too is writing as an individual and has a personal standpoint of his own, Dugin, in his response, argues against the whole notion of individual thought, saying:

“I accept it fully and agree to recognise the fact that our Russian (Eurasian) individuation consists in the desire to manifest something more general than our individual features. So, being a collective entity … for me is rather an honour. The more holistic is my position, the better it is.”

Now it may be acceptable, even noble, that Russian leaders are willing to sacrifice their own “individual features” for the good of the fatherland, but de Carvalho wasn’t talking about “features.” He was talking about a viewpoint on the nature of vital philosophical issues of government and social thought. Though he doesn’t mention this, the debate actually centers around whether one can think as an individual or only as a collective entity—a notion with overtones of science fiction, evoking dark images of Brave New World and 1984, for example. Just as importantly, Dugin’s unvarnished preference for group think as opposed to individuality touches on the very nature of thought (or cognition) and what it is.

For de Carvalho, thought is modern (as opposed to postmodern) and concrete. Truth can be known and is objective, ie, something that exists on its own outside the self (the debater in this case) and outside the collective. For Dugin, truth is what his powerful autocrat friends decide it is and say it is.  What you or I think is of no consequence.  One of his arguments in a later round was that Olavo de Carvalho was on the losing side, not because his reasoning was faulty, but because his side lacks power in both the East and the West. Unfortunately, he is right. But in a fair debate, which of the two debaters has the most power is irrelevant. His reasoning amounts to bullying, pure and simple.

Aside from all the deeper philosophical arguments presented here, this debate boils down to a confrontation of freedom vs. serfdom, individual rights vs. rule by an independent oligarchy.

If Dugin has his way, the world would be ruled by a technocracy. If de Carvalho has his way, you and I can live in a relatively free world where individuals could use the observations and logic to draw our own conclusions about the world and issues that are vital to us. If Dugin has his way, the powerful decide for you. Whether Dugin considers himself a postmodernist or not, he in fact defends an important aspect of that philosophy. For while the postmodernist believes that truth cannot be known, the Eastern philosopher like Dugin believes that — if it exists at all — it is irrelevant and only power matters.

What’s more, he doesn’t seem to understand that the fight of de Carvalho and all free people is not only against the Eurasian viewpoint Dugin represents but also against the Ruling Elite in the West (as de Carvalho later contends). Thus, in terms of power, the fight is unbalanced, favoring Dugin and the vast majority of influential Western thinkers – a true David vs Goliath bout if there ever was one.

The whole notion behind our post-modern way of “thinking” is that the scientific method, consisting of

1— the formulation of a hypothesis through observations (inductive reasoning)

2— the testing of this hypothesis (experimentation)

3— the establishment of a conclusion (deductively) based on the results of that experimentation

4— Subsequent ongoing verification of the results and conclusion by independent researchers

has outlived its usefulness in areas such as philosophy, economics, political science, government, and social thought, no longer applies and must be replaced by a system based on consensus. Note that this conclusion itself was reached by fiat, not by use of a scientific method, but since that method is declared obsolete it supposedly no longer applies. Hence, this is circular thinking as the more astute reader will have observed. I need to point out that Dugin does not admit that he is a postmodernist and probably, he would reject my mentioning that issue, but the commonality lies in the fact that postmodernism in politics does in fact rely on consensus and denies the individual’s ability to reach valid conclusions on his own. That, by inference, is a denial of the scientific method, without which the truth cannot be apprehended.

Despite the abandonment of the above-described scientific method in vital areas that affect our lives, but that fall outside the “natural sciences[2],” these 4 steps remain unquestioned as the requisite procedures by which we infer knowledge in the field of natural science. Thus, researchers in the areas of all natural sciences, such as physics, chemistry and medicine, are required to use this method, and aside from out and out cheating and falsification of results, such as that observed  at the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit, and aside from the area of origin of life research, most researchers stick to this rigorous method, out of necessity.

As an aside, it is more than intriguing that, in the non-exact sciences, the scientific method was replaced by those who are opposed to a society based on biblical principles. The Left’s age-old notion that Christianity has been an obstacle to scientific thought would seem, a priori, incompatible with the abolition of the scientific method.

Yet it is the Left that wants to abolish it. Also beyond intriguing is the fact that one of the key links in the philosopher chain that led to the development of the scientific method was a monk named Roger Bacon, who was able to publish his three tomes outlining the method (Opus Majus, Opus Minus and Opus Tertium) thanks to a commission granted by Pope Clement in 1265.

None of this movement to eliminate the scientific method in the interpretation of our world is comprehensible without an understanding of the Left’s desire to replace Christianity with their own religion, which could be called “Historicity.” Though never enunciated specifically by anyone, this is the religion whereby History would be God. When the Democrats say “we are on the side of history,” what they mean is that History (I use the capital H because it is their god) is tending toward all the progressive goals they are working toward, such as homosexual marriage, drug legalization, abolition of the words father and mother, abolition of the traditional family, wealth redistribution, abolition of borders, abolition of all immigration laws in rich countries and enforcement of Draconian environmental regulations in rich countries but not in the Third World, abolition of petroleum use, strict China-like population control, and in short, abolition of the traditional concept of law and order and the establishment of a Global Oligarchy with the “progressives” in charge. And to the Left, these agendas are sacred missions.

Though they would never admit it, in an effort to implement these long-term goals, their short-term goal is to eliminate thought, or cognition, as it is traditionally construed, and replace it with the notion of consensus, as reflected by Dugin’s statements quoted above. But what that means specifically is a consensus formed by a majority whose thoughts and attitudes are controlled by the Oligarchs through psychological control techniques designed to make the members of the target group believe that they arrived at their conclusions independently and that, therefore, they are free.

Which leads us to the thorny task of defining freedom.

Most of us derive our own definition of freedom simply by evaluating each individual situation and asking ourselves essentially “do I feel free or do I feel coerced in this situation?”

But, while that cognitive habit is useful in everyday situations, it is fatally flawed when we consider how easy it is, through thought control techniques, to induce the majority to arrive at predetermined conclusions and to convince them that they have arrived at these conclusions independently on an individual basis.

So that definition is a non-starter.

But post-modern “philosophers” have been saying, roughly since Nietzsche, that truth cannot be known. Now, by extension, freedom could not be defined if that were so. This claim, however, negates itself, because if it is true that truth cannot be known, then this statement itself obviously cannot be called the truth and is of no epistemological value.

More indicting of postmodernism is the fact that the scientific method is still used in the exact sciences, not because it is accepted by academics by consensus, but because it is indispensable and because the best minds have not only accepted its use but have not been able to successfully disprove its usefulness or get by without it.

All successful new drugs and new scientific discoveries are tested, verified and authenticated by this method. Any that are disqualified by the method are discarded. Patent specifications routinely contain hypotheses, test results and conclusions.

The claim that this method does not apply to other areas of vital national, global or personal interest would require overcoming a huge cognitive hurdle, and it would fail, because to say the scientific method no longer applies or that truth cannot be known would be analogous to saying that a glass is no longer necessary to hold drinking water. That would be sophism, pure and simple, and would in no way affect our lives because people would continue to use glasses to drink water regardless – not because consensus had made that the accepted method to drink water but because without a drinking glass it would be impossible or unnecessarily difficult to drink water. The musings of idle minds on this subject would be of no consequence in the real world.

Like the drinking glass, sound objective thinking based on the tried-and-true method generally going by the name “scientific method” is nothing but a tool and is not subject to sophist argumentation.

Therefore, by extension, Alexandr Dugin’s argument that consensus (“being a collective entity” and hence thinking collectively) is superior to the individual’s own thought processes, based (by implication) on the scientific method (even though neither debater uses this term), should also be rejected by anyone of sound mind. That is, if the free world itself is to survive.

Yet, the fact that fantasy-based Keynesian economics continues to be the dominant orientation in Western universities, and the fact that banks are allowed to gamble fraudulently with their clients’ money and then receive unconstitutional bailouts instead of a jail sentence, is a reminder that, in spite of a sovereign debt that threatens our dollar and our children’s future, Western society has yet to acknowledge the usefulness of practical tools – common sense and free market economics – as vital to our welfare as the common drinking glass.

I think even Alexandr Dugin would agree with me on that.

The author is a technical translator who has translated, since 1971, over 10,000 scientific and medical documents and patents.

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[1] Olavo de Carvalho has been a thorn in the side of the leftist government in Brazil, which sides with Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez and imprisons or fines Christians, for example, who stick to biblical teachings on homosexuality.

[2] By natural sciences I mean sciences involving observable regularly behaving phenomena whose regular behavior can be used to derive laws by observation and experimentation.

The debate:

http://www.theinteramerican.org/blogs/98-olavo-de-carvalho/247-olavo-de-carvalho-debates-aleksandr-dugin-i.html

We are all loonies now

by Don Hank

There is at least one report that Jared Lee Loughner may be associated with the so-called “patriot movement,” sort of second cousins to the Libertarians. Indeed, he thinks (if it can be called thinking) exactly like one.

In the early 90s a business acquaintance of mine invited me to a meeting of a group he called “patriots.” They sat around discussing the Constitution and heroic people who defy the government on the basis of what they considered to be their constitutional rights. One of the first things I noticed was a frequent ear-grating misuse of the word “whom” (in the subjective case) by some of the speakers who seemed to be accepted as authorities by the rest of the group.

I was told that one of the guys in the group specialized in baiting the cops by driving around in a car without a tag. Whenever he was pulled over, he pulled a copy of the Constitution out of his glove compartment and showed the officer a clause protecting the right of free travel. This he interpreted to mean that the government could not force anyone to buy a license to use a car. This same gentleman was unemployed, spending most of his time fighting the “fascist” government. He couldn’t afford to pay his mortgage but claimed no one had the right to evict him, again, supposedly based on the Constitution. He had a sign on his door stating that the “owner of this house is a Christian gentleman” and something to the effect that no one had the right to evict him, alluding to the dear Constitution he claimed as his all-purpose personal shield. The group seemed to accord him a special degree of respect.

Another guy in the group, who was dependent on a prescription antidepressant, was obliged to leave his apartment upon expiry of his lease. He had made a pest of himself, going around challenging people, including his fellow tenants and his landlords, on the constitutionality of various laws. Like Jared Lee Loughner, he had made himself unwelcome everywhere, including in areas he had staked out as his turf.

This evicted “patriot” sued the landlord in court and told the judge it was his Constitutional right to have his lease renewed, but did not cite any particular part of the Constitution. It was as if that document was for him what a silver cross is to a vampire’s intended victim. Just brandishing it before the enemy makes you invulerable. The best he could come up with, following disjointed statements, was “my freedom was bought at the price of patriots’ blood.” 

He seemed to be conflating the Founders with Jesus. At any rate, the judge did not accept the argument.

This “patriot’s” case best spotlights what is wrong with a very tiny segment of the US population, who are neither leftists nor conservatives.  They claim to love their country but what they mean is themselves. The Constitution in no way calls for security for renters or restricts the right of property owners to rent to whomever they want to. It is in fact Statists who argue that landlords should not be entitled to freely choose whom they may or may not rent to but should rather be constrained by the State to rent to a percentage of minorities corresponding to the general demographics. The plaintiff in this case was in fact arguing for a kind of affirmative action for himself.

Claiming to be a “sovereign citizen,” this plaintiff was in fact demanding that the State intervene on his behalf against the wishes of his landlord. While claiming the Constitution as his defense, he was in fact using a liberal-progressive interpretation of that document.

It was just such a tragic and self-centered misunderstanding of the Constitution that seems to have motivated Jared Lee Loughner in his war against his Pima Community College. The college had learned early on that Loughner was extremely disruptive and posed a potential threat to his professors and classmates, and as a result, had seen fit to expel him. But Loughner asserted on his web page that they had deprived him of his First Amendment right to free speech.

There always will be people out there like Loughner and the patriots to whom I was introduced in the early 90s.

But these people most certainly are not conservatives, quite the opposite. They outwardly pretend to share our concern for the Constitution and for the way it is being trampled in our courts and legislatures.

But in fact, their concern is for themselves, their own selfish interests, and they are, in their own way, attempting to usurp and distort the Constitution for personal gain and power. In this way they are no different from the power happy activist judges in our courts. What these Statist patriots demand on their own behalf, the Statist Left demands in the name of social and economic justice. The difference is razor-thin.

Thus, seen in this light, the loony Left, in accusing conservative talk radio and TV hosts and politicians like Sara Palin of inciting loony Loughner to kill, is in fact trying to distance itself from a man who is arguably one of their own. They are succeeding in part so far because naive people on the other side have allowed themselves, out of fear, to be branded by their lies and people in the amorphous center believe them. They really ought to see through the subterfuge.

But looniness – in this case, manifested as the mental incapacity to see through a relatively transparent smoke screen — is spreading epidemically thanks to the wondrous distortive power of the press.

Only he who does nothing makes no mistakes.

–Russian proverb

by Don Hank

Every time an American patriot falls for a hoax, as I did with a hoax video showing Obama apparently admitting he was born in Kenya, the devil laughs out loud.

Anthony Horvath, author of Birthpangs and owner of the site Athanatos, sent me the below link to the original of that video, clearly showing that Obama did not admit he was born in Kenya on that occasion (Laigle’s Forum partner Horvath has since posted a column on this at Laigle’s):

http://www.whitehouse.gov/video/The-President-Talks-with-Students-in-Turkey?category=9

It hurts our cause when we fall for these hoaxes. After I sent out my acknowledgment that this was false and that I had been fooled by this, one friend emailed back saying he was discouraged from ever reading emails disparaging Obama.

That is, of course, exactly what the Left wants, and it may very well be the Left that is behind this. At the very least, it is not a person who loves truth. It is wrong, it is a sin against God to perpetrate a hoax of this kind or to act dishonestly in a way intended to bring gain or false honor to ourselves. It leaves our cause of freedom with mud all over its face. Leave the hoaxes and fake data up to the Left. Do not borrow this trait from them. You become complicit when you do.

Let’s play clean. If you find yourself forwarding an email without paying enough attention, you owe it to every recipient to admit you were fooled. It is hard, but they will forgive you and sympathize because all of us have been had a time or two.

Pick yourself up after that confession, realizing you did the right thing, a brave thing, and then just march onward in pursuit of truth.

That is what smart scientists do all the time. They find some data that seems to suggest a hypothesis, and they go about finding more data to support it. The honest ones, if they are proven wrong, write up the conclusion reflecting that their hypothesis was wrong, and then they turn around and research something else.

Losers make mistakes and then try to hide them. Winners make mistakes, admit them and then dust themselves off and move on.

Of course, this “post-Christian” era is also post-scientific, which demonstrates that when you give up on the Lord, you have also given up on science and wisdom. This dismissal of science (that is, of facts) in favor of utopian fancies has led us down the primrose path almost to the point of no return. Banks can’t do science – the science of numbers – any more. They are guided by utopian dreams of “social justice,” which is neither Christian nor scientific. In other words, what they put to paper doesn’t work in the real world. In fact, this pursuit of an impossible and unworthy goal brought down banks, mortgage companies and brokerages that packaged and sold bad subprime mortgages (along with some good and mediocre ones) all over the world in a dirty scheme to save their own hides after committing the sin of giving away what was not theirs to give (by lending to the non-creditworthy). Likewise our lawmakers make unconstitutional bankruptcy laws that in fact lead to “legal” theft of goods and property, ultimately leading to equally criminal bailouts and stimulus packages, which also have failed, leading in turn to our official figure of 9.5% unemployment, which translates to over 20% unemployment in real numbers.

Likewise, scientists, like those at the University of East Anglia, can’t do meteorology any more. Instead of honestly reporting the data, as was done in the Old World Order, they tailor the data to suit the needs of world politicians subscribed to the New World Order.

We are a society of deceivers and deceived. It is no exaggeration that even we conservatives have become our enemy.

I was recently invited to join a recently founded conservative foundation as a fellow. Thinking of it as a stepping stone of sorts, and putting aside a slight anxiety over being used, I agreed to join but shortly thereafter, once I saw the shenanigans and petty politics, turned down the “honor” of being a fellow.  For one thing, the director asked me to write a press release billing this brand new foundation as “prestigious.” Sorry, but a brand new foundation hasn’t had the time to be prestigious. Lying is bad enough, but asking someone with conservative credentials to lie for you is beyond the pale.

If only people could see the harm they are doing by stretching the truth. Many of the same people who rear up in outrage against liberals for taking liberties with truth will not hesitate to do the same thing if they think it will bring them gain. For shame!

We can break free only if we are rigorously honest with ourselves and others.

Let me kick off the movement by saying:

I have been had, more than once. I’m sorry, but I definitely am not quitting. I will continue to move on, making mistakes at times, but will never quit.

In fact, I have only just begun to fight. Now let’s move on, America. This is no time to hide our heads in the sand. We have study and work to do. And — in the learning process – mistakes to make and confess.