Other Issues

The Other, Complete Insanities We Face

Without a doubt, there are a ton of issues - or more correctly, symptoms - being thrown at us. The attacks are hitting us so quickly, and on so many fronts, it is hard to know where to even start fighting - which is exactly the intent of those who rule this sinking ship.

Our main focus needs to be on excising the cancer that is causing the symptoms - George, Dick and their 535 congressional cohorts. We get rid of them, and start electing men and women who will obey the law, and we will be a long way toward healing this nation. In the meantime, here are a few things we should probably keep an eye on:

The American Gulag
The Right to Bear Arms
The U.S. Department of Offense
The Afghan Quagmire
Iran - Targeted for "Freedom an Democracy"?
The "War" on Terror
World Trade Center Building 7
National Sovereignty
Our Borders
A Sound Foreign Policy
The Income Tax Scam
"Gay" Marriage - A Call For Separation
The Iraqi Nuclear Waste Dump
Motherland Security
The Real National Debt
Global Warming - Fact or Fiction?
Free Trade
The Social Security Ponzi Scheme
Israel and the Palestinians
Skyrocketing Health Care Costs
The "War" on Drugs
(Click on the above for details)

The American Gulag
The United States has less than 5% of the world's population, yet we currently house 25% of the world's prisoners. The American prison industry has become such a shocking and morally reprehensible mess, it deserves far more attention than anyone is willing to give it. We currently have 2.3 million prisoners rotting away in our nations jails and prisons - many for non-violent "crimes" - incarcerating ourselves at a rate of 751 per 100,000 in population, the highest rate in the world. This increases to 1 out of 100 if we only count the adults - and it gets even worse for minorities, with as many as 12% of black males aged 20-34 currently sitting behind bars. The world's average incarceration rate is only 125 prisoners for every 100,000 people. This means...

America cages our citizens at a rate nearly SIX times greater than rest of the world! Probably not a statistic we should be too proud of.

The Right to Bear Arms gun
The 2nd Amendment does not bestow some special new right to us. It merely affirms our inalienable right to self defense and guarantees access to the means with which to exercise it. Therefore, any ban based on gun style, size, caliber, rate of fire, magazine capacity, etc. is in direct conflict with the Constitution and should be immediately repealed.

Notice that the "right of the people to keep and bear arms," does not limit us to the little peashooters they allow us to keep. While that nasty looking thing pictured above was not around when the 2nd Amendment was written, that is precisely the kind of capability our founders intended for a well armed militia - as they were well aware that there could come a time when the people may need to use some extra persuasion to reign in a rogue federal government.

In a rather remarkable development, the Supreme Court ruled in DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA ET AL. v. HELLER that the words "the right of the people" mean exactly what a normal person would think they mean. In unequivocally striking down the draconian DC handgun ban, they left some unanswered questions, but this ruling could have been a lot worse. Maybe there is hope for us yet. See The Second Amendment is Already Dead for more thoughts on this. [Back to Top]

The U.S. Department of Offense
It is time to entirely rethink the way we provide for the common defense of the states. Many are unaware that we spend more money on our military than the rest of the world spends on theirs - combined! That includes some of the (other) really cutthroat regimes, like China, Russia and North Korea. Could it be possible that it takes nearly a trillion dollars a year to defend ourselves? No, not even close. Most of that money is spent protecting the American empire in an ill-fated attempt to convert the rest of the world to the twisted version of American "democracy. It is time to step back and ask ourselves, "Why?"

There would be little need for a standing army of 1.5 million if we would simply quit trying to be the world's police force. A highly trained and well-armed militia could replace almost every one of our full time soldiers in the Army and Marine Corps. We just need to reset our priorities - and commit to keeping them out of foreign entanglements! We probably do need a Navy to patrol our shores, but does that mean we should deploy fourteen carrier battle groups? We would only need a few of them if our goal was to keep our coasts safe from invasion. And as far as the Air Force, do we really need weapons like the new F-22 radar evading fighter at $280 million a copy? Not if we would quit trying to sneak around in places we do not belong! The list goes on and on.

We need to relegate our military to the constitutionally authorized task of providing for the common defense of the states. In which case, there should never be a single American soldier stationed outside of the U.S. unless they are repelling an actual invasion.

On top of the 210,000 troops we have left stranded in Iraq and Afghanistan, (along with 100,000 or so contractors) we have 70,000 stationed in Germany, 40,000 in Japan, 40,000 in Korea, 12,000 in Italy - for a total of some 500,000 troops languishing in 130 of the worlds 192 other countries. This is completely insane, of course, and is bankrupting our country. So let's bring every one of them home!

We seem to have confused our military with a Department of Offense! By simply obeying the law, and organizing a real militia - with real weapons - we could provide a national defense force that no nation on earth would ever be able to penetrate. And we could do it for a mere fraction of the current burn rate - and the "homeland" (and the world) would be much safer! You will find additional commentary here. [Back to Top]

The Afghan Quagmire - Time to Call it a Victory and Bring Our Troops Home!
We invaded Afghanistan under the (arguably) noble guise of capturing the alleged 9/11 masterminds. Why we invaded Afghanistan, when 15 of the suicidal lunatics that crashed those planes supposedly came from Saudi Arabia, has never been fully explained. (Could it have anything to do with Saudi oil? Nah!) Well here we are, almost seven years later, and our mission in Afghanistan has changed from one of catching the bad guys, to the mission of...of...er...hmm......hey, what the heck is our mission there anyway?

Must not have been too important of a mission as we broke off whatever it was we were doing in Afghanistan and went after our former friend and CIA double agent, Saddam Hussein. Does John McCain have a hundred year plan for Afghanistan too? [Back to Top]

Iran - Due For a Lethal Dose of "Freedom and Democracy?"
It's been over five years since we invaded any defenseless third world countries, so somebody with their finger on the button must be getting bored. There is a long list of those threatening to wipe Iran off the face of the earth - with George Bush and his merry band of cutthroats leading the charge. He is being aided in this insanity by a majority of Senators from "both" sides of the aisle. It even looks like Obama is jumping onto the Iranian war wagon. Gee, good thing we have a two party system.

Meanwhile, our good friends in Israel are busily stirring the pot, doing their best to provoke an incident - with their dire warnings about the Iranian nuclear threat growing more intense, and desperate, every day.

We have been down this ugly road before, and we know where it ends - a sudden, uniquely American Weapon of Mass Destruction called "freedom and democracy" may be exploding over an Iranian neighborhood soon. [Back to Top]

The "War" on Terror
We have to get over the delusion that "they hate us because we are free." First of all, we are not free - if anyone needs to be rescued from an oppressive regime, it is the American people. Second, "they" have been quite clear about why they hate us. They will continue trying to chop every one of our heads off as long as we keep poking around in their business, occupying their lands and killing their people. So let's disengage from all of the imperialistic conquests we have ventured off on and spend a little more energy cleaning up the mess we have made for ourselves right here at home.

Check out Osama Bin Laden's profoundly curious FBI most wanted terrorist listing. One would expect to see accusations that he was the 9/11 mastermind being plastered all over the posting. However, the only terrorist act the FBI has specifically tagged him with is the 1998 embassy bombings in Africa. Have we been chasing a phantom enemy for the last seven years? Hmm.

Our real threat comes from the domestic enemies who have betrayed the oaths they swore to defend the Constitution. They concocted the "war on terror" as an elaborate deception to hide the great harm they have inflicted on our Republic - and to keep the American people in fearful, humble servitude.
[Back to Top]

wtc7

See video of WTC 7 inexplicably
imploding on itself

World Trade Center Building 7
If you want to dig a little deeper into what happened, or did not happen, on the morning of September 11, go to Google and type in "WTC 7." For as yet unexplained reasons, World Trade Center Building 7, which was not hit by any airplanes, imploded onto its own footprint seven hours after WTC Towers 1&2 came down. In the real world, forty-seven story, steel frame buildings do not spontaneously disassemble themselves at the speed of gravity - unless other more potent forces are at work. However, in the land of make-believe, a forty-seven story, steel frame building like WTC 7 can implode on itself in less than seven seconds for no apparent reason.

Oddly, the official 9/11 report never bothered to sift through the rubble of this rather miraculous event. [Back to Top]

National Sovereignty
It is time to Get the U.S. out of the U.N.! It is ludicrous to continue sending billions to this America hating, world government promoting organization. Congress needs to cut off all UN funding immediately - and while we’re at it, we should...

Get the U.N. Out of the U.S.!

Our Borders
It is scandalous that Congress has turned our borders into a virtual sieve. While we cannot blame those individuals who wish to come here for the opportunity to support their families, they are obligated to do it legally. That being said, there is a reality check we need to consider. A cursory look at who is picking crops in our nations farms will reveal that there are very few of us who want to work in that back-breaking environment. That poses an obvious problem - Oregon farmers and other businesses need a large workforce, so unless we want to stop eating, or want to get off our duffs and work the fields, we are going to need to import the necessary amount of workers to fill these jobs. It only makes sense to give those workers an opportunity to come here legally - while kicking out all the ones who think the law does not apply to them.

We provide better protection for the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan than we do for our own southern border. That doesn't make any sense. So, in conjunction with the mass exodus of all those who are here illegally, we should put the appropriate defenses in place to make sure the only people we allow across our borders are those who want to play by the rules. Why does that seem so complicated? [Back to Top]

A Sound Foreign Policy

"...peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations,
entangling alliances with none..." Thomas Jefferson

The Income Tax Scam
Not that anybody could ever definitively answer a question when it relates to the IRS code, (why do you think they call it a "code"?) but there is a serious doubt whether any of our wages are taxable according to the law. However, even if you feel obligated to pay everything they tell you to, (Confession: I do pay all my taxes, see "Playing Russian Roulette with a Bolt Action Rifle") the federal government would never need a dime from you if we eliminated the 80-90% of federal spending that is unconstitutional. Duties, excise taxes etc. would cover the whole thing.

An interesting question: if we pay all of our taxes in phony Federal Reserve Notes, or Dollar Bills, which the Federal Reserve created out of nothing, where does all the FRN "money" end up? Then consider that a "Note" or a "Bill" is a debt. Which means we "pay" our taxes with a debt. Whoa!

A guy could go nuts trying to figure out all the ways they are trying to rip us off. [Back to Top]

"Gay" Marriage - A Call for the Separation of Marriage and State
We have spent way, waaaaay too much time worrying about this one. Marriage was intended to be a church issue - "Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh." That came from the Bible, not the Constitution, so why should we need a government license to engage in something GOD ordained from the beginning of time?

As usual, we waste a massive amount of effort fighting the symptom rather than trying to figure out what is causing the problem - which is that whatever we let the government license, the government will also regulate. Is it any wonder this has turned into a total circus? The proper solution is to get the government completely out of the marriage licensing business and let the churches handle it.

Scripture, common sense, as well as the anatomic realities, makes it undeniably clear that men were designed to procreate with women. (Well, duh!) However, if a particular church wants to break all the rules and make a mockery of the natural order of things, there is no need for us to get all shook up over it - just as long as we aren't forced to sanction or subsidize their behavior. The First Amendment applies equally - and particularly - to those who hold religious beliefs we may not agree with.

NO MARRIAGE LICENSE + NO TAX BREAKS + NO GOVERNEMNT CONTROL = NOBODY CARES! Why does everything have to be done the hard way? [Back to Top]

The Iraqi Nuclear Waste Dump
The same guys who told us the tall tales about those enormous Iraqi WMD stockpiles and their active nuclear weapons program, are now telling us the thousand tons of Depleted Uranium rounds (with a half life of about four billion years!) we left strewn all over Iraq are perfectly safe and pose no health risk to our soldiers. (or to any hapless Iraqi citizen who happens to stumble upon a DU round) Question: Would you want to stroll through the very same nuclear waste few U.S. Governors want dumped in their state - even when stored in specially designed vaults? Isn't it a bit of a twisted irony that after using phantom Iraqi nuclear weapons programs as an excuse to invade their country, we are now using weapons made from nuclear waste during the occupation? (if you want to get really ticked off, go to google and type in "depleted uranium")

The Department of Motherland Security
We can be reasonably confident there was not even a single Congressman who voted to approve The Homeland Security Act, The Patriot Act or the Patriot Act II that ever actually read them - because no one could possibly wade through the combined 170,000 words of gibberish contained in the bills.

Do you feel safer knowing the federal government is snooping around in your private affairs? Do you feel safer knowing the Federal government is looking into your spending habits, bank accounts and medical history? Do you feel safer boarding an airplane after you and the elderly couple next to you are strip searched? Do you feel safer knowing that they had to make up a whole unit of measure, called the petabyte, to describe the size of the enormous hard drives that will be required to store the mountains of information they are collecting about you?

Do you feel safer knowing the federal government can arrest American citizens, hold them indefinitely, refuse them access to counsel, ship them off for interrogation to a country that has even less aversion to torture than we do - and not even charge them with a crime? Just who is winning this "war" on terror anyway?

With enemies like the Department of Homeland Security setting up shop in our own neighborhoods, why should we be afraid of terrorists that have to travel 8,000 miles to stick a knife in our throats? (Check out my commentary, The Department of Homeland Control for more thoughts on this.) [Back to Top]

The Real National Debt
If our government used the same accounting methods we force corporations to use, the 2005 deficit would have been listed at $760 billion, according to this Treasury Department report - not the $319 billion as widely reported by the Bush administration's highly capable staff of professional liars. Further, if all the unfunded liabilities, like Social Security, Medicaid/Medicare, and government pensions were were added in, the 2005 deficit would have been closer to $3.5 trillion! That is a one year deficit!

The problem gets exponentially worse the farther out we look. The published figure of our total national debt is about $9.3 trillion. However, according to USA Today, and confirmed rather cryptically in that same Treasury report, if we added in everything we owe for the unfunded liabilities - the actual national debt is closer to $65 trillion! How could that be possible, you ask? Well obviously, aside from the outright lies, we are only getting part of the story about the avalanche of debt we are buried under. The real truth is hidden deep within obscure reports that no one ever reads. You will need to spend a little bit of time if you want to figure this one out for yourself.

The sleeping masses are oblivious to the economic tsunami that is heading toward our shores.

Global Warming - Fact or Fiction?
Is saving the human race worth spending trillions of dollars? Put in those terms, it is hard to argue against spending whatever it takes to save the planet. However, cooler heads need to take a step back and ask a few more questions before we jump to any conclusions trying to solve a problem that may not exist. The Global Warming Petition claims to have gathered petitions from 31,000 American scientists, including 9,000 with PhDs, who said, "There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gasses is causing, or will in the forseable, cause catastrophic heating of the earth's atmosphere and disruption of the Earth's climate." This is a hugely complex issue that deserves some more investigation. [Back to Top]

Free Trade
We should support free and fair trade. But Congress has a duty to protect us from dumping by foreign companies that target our key industries. It should also be made very difficult for a U.S. company to shut down their manufacturing operations here and then immediately re-open their factory in a foreign country. They relocate to, or source products from countries where they pay the equivalent of slave labor wages and where they do not have to follow any of the oppressive regulations we do here. We are committing national suicide by killing off our manufacturing base. Congress is mandated to regulate international commerce and it is time to use those powers to protect our industries.

NAFTA, GATT, WTO and MFN have been colossal failures. We need to terminate all of these American job killing trade agreements immediately - and we should not even think of joining the FTAA!

The Social Security Ponzi Scheme
Did anyone ever imagine this would turn into a $500 billion a year entitlement? What a nightmare! We did, however, make a deal (albeit a bad deal) with the current retirees, and we need to honor that. We also need to repeal the income tax we imposed on their benefits because a tax on money that the government has held on to for up to 45 years is just plain wrong.

Question for the retired folks: After a lifetime of putting 15% of your income into Social Security, would you rather have several million dollars deposited in a bank account with your name on it, or would you rather wait for the government to send you a $1,000 check each month and then hope for an increase of 1-2% a year? Even a bank deposit at Money Market rates would have dramatically outperformed your Social Security "investment". And you - and your children - would own the (funny) money! Let's not saddle our children with the same Ponzi scheme we were sold.

The solution to the Social Security mess is to let all current workers opt completely out of the system by collecting all the money they and their employers have paid in to the "Social Security Trust Fund." (Don't hold your breath.)

By the way, there is no "Social Security Trust Fund" and there never was. The system is broke and trillions in debt. [Back to Top]

Israel and the Palestinians
Only a completely insane person would ever even think about sticking their nose in the middle of a nasty situation like this. Talk about a lose/lose deal. These problems go back thousands of years and we will never begin to understand the deep seated reasons behind this conflict. Nothing we have done has made things any better - in fact, all our meddling has probably made things worse. The best thing we Americans could do is to mind our own business and let the Israelis and the Palestinians solve this on their own.

Skyrocketing Health Care Costs
We are blessed with one of the finest health care systems in the world. If we would keep the federal government out of it, we could make it an even better system. Obviously, good health care is not free and it never will be. Somebody has to pay for it. And unless we want to simply print more money, health care funding can only come from one place - you and me. Why would anyone assume that the federal government can confiscate our money, take it all the way back to Washington DC and then turn around and send a little of it back - but yet somehow provide better medical care for us than we could if we just kept our own money in the first place? It makes absolutely no sense.

Everyone deserves access to affordable health care - which is clearly not happening today. However, forcing private hospitals to treat indigent patients for free, which the current law requires, is not a solution. That makes about as much sense as forcing grocery stores to hand out free food to the hungry - or forcing banks to hand out free money to the poor.

High health care costs are in part a symptom of the federal meddling ($600 billion was mismanaged by Medicare/Medicaid just last year) that has been damaging the health care industry for many decades. There is also the issue of the big health care lobyists bribing half of Congress. Trusting the federal government to fix a problem that the federal government created is not a very good game plan.

We Oregonians are a kind and generous people. We are not going to stand idly by if our neighbors are sick and in need of help. The Oregon Health Plan will spend some $14 billion over the next two years helping 350,000 Oregonians who do not have private health insurance. (Tragically, the plan also pays to kill 4,000 unborn Oregonians every year) If we could force the federal government to quit confiscating the wealth of so many Oregonians, there would be plenty of money left in our pockets so we could do an even better job taking care of our own. [Back to Top]

The "War" on Drugs
The "war" on drugs has been a spectacular failure. If we take an honest look at the effects this war has had on those of us in society who do not use mind-altering drugs, we will find that the cure is far worse than the disease. The amount of peripheral crime that is generated around the illegal drug trade is absolutely huge, which has obviously had a very negative impact on the non-drug abusing portion of society. As a result, we are all forced to deal with; increased property crimes, violent gang turf wars, crowded prisons, soaring taxes, invasive banking regulations and reporting, intrusions into our private affairs, paramilitary oriented local police forces, augmented by a heavily armed and increasingly oppressive federal police force - all of which has led to a serious erosion of our freedoms - just because some people can not exercise any self control.

The costs to the rest of us for this failed drug policy have been enormous. We need to admit the failure of this "war" and change our whole drug policy away from enforcement and incarceration and move to a decriminalized, treatment oriented policy. Do we want to help these people or just punish them? We should throw the book at violent offenders, but if the threat of jail (500,000 jailed and counting) were an effective deterrent to the average drug user, then we would no longer have a drug problem. Something is not working.

Center for Disease Control statistics reveal that 14,000 people die annually from the abuse of illegal, mind altering drugs. This is certainly not a good thing, but there are reports that claim over 100,000 Americans die each year from adverse reactions to legally prescribed (many of which are mind altering) drugs. And millions of our nation's youth are being pumped up with powerful, brain-eating psychotropic drugs like Ritalin - just to keep them from being kids. All of which makes the illegal drugs seem downright safe in comparison!

Additionally, if we are going to have an honest discussion about behaviors that will ruin your life, we need to talk about the annual deaths that are the direct result of tobacco use (430,000 killed), obesity (325,000 killed), alcoholism (81,000 killed) and unnatural sexual activities (17,000 killed). Why pick on just one self destructive behavior to go after?

Based on the numbers, maybe we should send people to jail for smoking, drinking, sodomizing and getting fat!

Obviously, we should discourage the abuse of any drugs, especially ones that will turn your brain into mush. The point is, we live in a dangerous world and none of us are going to make it out of here alive. And stupid people who choose to destroy their bodies with drugs are among the least of our problems. So let's spend our time and energy solving the issues that will have the biggest impact in cleaning up the mess we have made for ourselves.

Meanwhile, we celebrate the use of the most deadly drug ever unleashed on the American people, a chemical weapon called RU-486, that has a near 100% mortality rate on the unborn victims it was designed to kill. [Back to Top]