The scientific argument for monogamy

I've heard this one before. Have you? "Humans might be naturally promiscuous," they say. Then they bolster their opinion with, "After all, our closest ancestors are apes and monkeys, and they're promiscuous." Now what do you say in response to that? You know that men are not apes, and that we aren't supposed to act just like them. The argument against their talking point has generally taken that tack (apes also engage in rape and infanticide, and we wouldn't want to make that part of society, would we?) or simply the emotional/spiritual form (we have the ability to act beyond our instincts, it separates us from the animals, etc.), which is hard to explain to someone who doesn't think we're anything special.

So in interests of advancing a new argument to bring into the mainstream, I would like to introduce you to the Prairie Vole.

The prairie vole is a curiosity among voles because of it's monogamous behavior. It has, in fact, *very* monogamous behavior. It forms a life-long mating bond. The mated couple live together, groom each other, engage in various animal forms of affection (rather than only showing interest during mating time), and the male even helps the female nurture and raise the children. Promiscuity is very rare, mostly because the mated vole comes to dislike the very scent of other voles of the opposite sex.

Why should we care about the prairie vole? After all, doesn't the whole "we are promiscuous because apes are promiscuous" argument hedge on our similarity to apes? Well, that's the interesting thing. We share DNA with the prairie vole. Specifically, our sexual-behavior DNA is an identical strand. It has the same information, and it repeats the same number of times. Does it make a difference? Yes. When that DNA strand was fitted into a sample group of the ardently promiscuous meadow vole, they turned just as monogamous as the prairie vole.

Curious, I did a search on "prairie vole" and "homosexual". The best I could come up with was a study that showed that prairie voles formed temporary same-sex relationships under certain conditions. However, though the relationships involved shared sleeping space and some grooming, they did not mention anything about actual *sexual* behavior.

Capitalism is not one-size-fits-all

"Well, we won't have any problems with the dead ones, sir."
"They'll have relatives. They always do."

The Robocop series of movies lampoons a city that is increasingly run by 'capitalism'. A far-reaching company with a pitiless CEO runs various public utilities and services, including the police department. As a result, poverty and crime reign supreme, and environmentalism has gone right out the window. It's a very funny set of movies. Unfortunately, socialists tend to take these movies as the solid truth and the danger against which they are fighting every time they ensure that the government, "not some corporation", tells you want to do.

Unfortunately, there is one basic thing that socialists seem to not understand about capitalism. Capitalism is an economic theory.

Now that sounds a bit silly, so let me explain further. Of course socialists know that capitalism is an economic theory. However, socialism is not. Or, more properly. socialism is not only an economic theory. Socialism is supposed to provide a framework for economic activity by replacing the market with a redistribution center. It is supposed to abolish property by giving it all to the government. In this way, it is much, much more than an economic theory. The socialist government is supposed to do so much more than to provide a framework within which free people can pursue happiness. Instead, full socialism must provide an economic framework, take personal responsibility for the personal welfare of all citizens, decide the proper lifestyle and employment for all citizens, and the moral framework by which the citizens act properly within the society.

It is important for socialists to understand that capitalism is not meant to fulfill all of these needs for a society. In the United States, for instance, capitalism provided the economic framework, Christianity provided the moral framework, the people took personal responsibility for their welfare, lifestyle, and employment, and a mixture of the people and Christianity provided for those who could not provide for themselves.

I have often heard liberals panic at the thought of not mandating all of these levels of society through the Federal Government, as if there was no other force in existence. They seem to believe that capitalism is meant to serve for everything, and if it doesn't, then capitalists simply believe that these other systems are unimportant.

Consider this for a moment. Suppose you have a guest visiting you, and he walks into the bathroom while you brushing your teeth. "What are you doing?" he gapes. "Moving the brush in those little circles?"
"Well, it works for me," you reply. "That's the best way to brush your teeth."
"Yes," he explains, "but it'll wreck your hair!"
This is how conservatives feel when they try to explain capitalism to liberals. The liberals seem to have no concept that (back to our analogy) you can brush your hair with different strokes than you use on your teeth, much less that you can do a far better job on both if you do not use the same method. Unfortunately, this gap in knowledge simply leads to the two talking past each other: the liberal demands to know how the poor will be cared for (this is usually the part they focus on), while the conservative is mystified as to how they got to be talking about charity instead of economic theory.

Spinning the situation

My congressman sent me a "poll/survey" through the email.

Right now, Congress and the president are negotiating a solution to resolve our default crisis. If Congress does NOT vote to raise the debt ceiling, do you believe that this would be a real and serious problem?*


Yes
No
Not Sure




As a member of the Congressional Seniors Task Force, I cosigned a letter to the President this month objecting to proposed benefit changes to Social Security and Medicare as part of any deal. Do you believe that changes to benefits and cuts to Medicare and Social Security should NOT be part of a debt agreement?


Medicare and Social Security should not be cut or changed.
Cuts to Social Security and Medicare should be considered.
Not Sure




Republicans in Congress have said they are unwilling to raise any taxes, including on oil companies, corporations and the wealthy. Do you believe that closing tax loopholes or increasing revenues on corporations or millionaires should be part of a balanced approach to ending our default crisis?


Yes
No
Not Sure

This was my emailed response:

I tried to take your survey on the debt limit crisis, but I couldn't. The answers to the questions were all horribly skewed, and I couldn't pick one that came even close to my thoughts.

If Congress does not raise the debt limit, it may be a serious problem, but not nearly as serious as if we raise it with no plan to balance the budget and start paying off the debt. It's a no-brainer that you don't open a new credit card for someone who has ten of them maxed out and no plan to pay them off, but that's exactly what President Obama is asking us to do.

I do disagree with cutting Medicare and Social Security as part of this deal. That is why I supported Cap/Cut/Balance so strongly. I also strongly support a repeal of Obamacare, which will cut Medicare spending as part of its function. I have the feeling, from your record over the years, that this is not what you had in mind when you signed the agreement.... especially as Obama has already sworn to veto plans that do not include cuts to either. I sincerely hope that you are not engaging in scare tactics through an implication that Obama is trying to stop the Conservative Opposition from cutting things that they have explicitly excluded from cuts again and again.

I believe that closing tax loopholes must be accompanied by lowering taxes. I cannot agree with equating the words "tax" and "revenue", as lowering taxes in the past decades has resulted in increased revenues. In fact, I believe firmly that raising taxes at this point on our job creators will only reduce revenues. What we need now is to remove the loopholes that big business prompted legislatures to create along with new taxes and regulations, and reduce overall tax rates, so that everybody pays their fair share. It is not lost on me that the companies that contribute to Democrat politicians end up paying less at tax time. This is wrong.

Please consider this to be my response to your survey.

The Sin Lists

So yet another angry group of people have decided to "refute the Bible" by printing a huge list of supposed "sins" according to the Bible in an attempt to make God look like an unreasonable idiot who doesn't deserve to be even thought about, much less followed. Unfortunately, they have outright distorted and sometimes lied about what Scripture says, so I have chosen to take their list of "sins" and explain what it's all about.

- Eating shellfish - This is one of the Old Testament rules on what creatures are and are not good to eat. However, there is no punishment listed for not holding to these rules, and they were arguably abolished in the New Testament with Peter's dream, in which God offered him "unclean" animals to eat and told him that they were now clean. I'd like to add, though, for the sake of completeness, that the animals labeled "unclean" in the OT are now known to carry an increased risk of food-borne illnesses.

- Wearing clothes made of more than one fabric - Again, this is a cultural requirement only. It has no punishment listed, and it is not labeled explicitly as "detestable" or an "abomination".

- Getting raped (this only goes for the ladies, but you can smooth things over by marrying your rapist, so…) - This one is an outright lie. The verse says that if a man *seduces* and lies with a virgin, that he can make it right by marrying her, unless her father refuses the marriage. In that case, he has to pay her three years' wages on the middle-class level. These days the payment would be approximately $180,000. Of course, seduction is not rape.

In fact, if a married woman has had sex with a man outside of the city, it is assumed that she was raped and so she merits no penalty whatsoever. The man, however, is put to death. There is no actual Biblical law regarding the punishment for rape.

However, we must remember that the Old Testament Law was a restraint, not the be-all and end-all of the country's laws. In a time when killing someone carried the punishment of your death and the death of all your friends and family, for instance, the OT law limits the punishment to the murderer. So to see what God's society did for rape, we have to look at the actual documented incidences of it. In every situation in which rape occurs, either the perpetrators were killed (sometimes very painfully) or the Bible makes it clear that their lack of punishment is in itself abhorrent. God does not treat rapists gently.

- Trimming your beard or sideburns - Cultural requirement only. It has no punishment listed, and it is not labeled explicitly as "detestable" or an "abomination".

- Getting remarried - Not according to the Old Testament, and in the New Testament it is only listed as a sin if your previous marriage was dissolved by what would now be called a "no-fault divorce".

- Planting more than one crop in a field - Cultural requirement only. It has no punishment listed, and it is not labeled explicitly as "detestable" or an "abomination".

- Having a wet dream - The term "unclean" is often misunderstood by non-Jews and non-Christians. Both Judaism and Christianity recognizes that we frequently fall short of the goal of utter righteousness. In other schools of religious thought, such as Secular Humanism, proving your own righteousness is very important. In Judaism and Christianity, it is not.

Anyways... back to uncleanliness. It is understood by Jews and Christians to be an inevitability rather than something to be avoided and feared at all costs. In addition, not all uncleanliness in the OT was a result of sin. Many times, it was a simple protection in the society. Any emission of semen made the man "unclean until evening", which was really a pretty lightweight requirement. Interestingly, the people who laugh at the Bible for requiring a man to wash his clothes after discharging semen all over himself are silent when it comes to the rules regarding diagnosis and treatment of mildew and mold in homes and clothing.

- Eating rare meat - Only meat that is rare enough to actively bleed. This had two uses. The first was hygenic... even today, we recognize that there are enough blood-borne illnesses to make drinking it a risky proposition. Secondly, the Old Testament is meant to teach humankind the importance of shed blood for forgiveness of sins, because that's the method Jesus had to use. For that reason, blood is especially sacred.

- Touching a dead animal - Cleanliness issue. The person has to wash and is "unclean until evening", meaning basically a temporary quarantine. He couldn't stick his hands inside an animal that died out in the field (this didn't refer to butchering your meat, by the way) and then proceed to knead bread for supper. Remember that the high death rate in childbirth a few centuries ago came from doctors who did not wash their hands when going from the morgue to the delivery room.

- Menstruating and/or earning your “red wings” - Issue of cleanliness, as with the semen, with an extra ritual required due to the blood, as described in the "rare meat" section. I'd like to add that the punishment for sex during menstruation was exile, not death.

- Getting a tattoo - Do not cut yourself or make marks on yourself for the dead. Whether this applies to all tattoos or just putting a permanent representation of your dead relatives on your skin is up for debate. It's also worth noting that people back then used to slash themselves with knives (and sometimes kill their own children) because they believed that their gods would not listen to them unless they suffered enough. God did not want His people developing that mindset about Him.

Hope this helps the next time someone starts spouting laws that they don't understand.

We want a king!

I got onto a forum temporarily and found myself discussing Obamacare. I got the usual, nods of affirmation and extra explanations from some, while the detractors contented themselves with no better response than "you're an idiot". While I was thinking over Obamacare and what it does and doesn't do, however, I realized something startling and made a larger connection.

One of the worrying attributes of Obamacare is the incredibly large power shift from the private sector to the government. The nature of that attribute, however, deserves further study. Over and over again one man is mentioned: the head of the Department of Health and Human Services. This person, not Congress, will develop the three government-approved healthcare plans covered by the mandate, the ones I like to call "Regular, Premium, and Premium Plus". All Americans will have to have one of these three plans, purchased from one private company or another... does it matter anymore which company you use?

Consider the implications of that for a moment. Suppose the head of this department, unelected, appointed by the President, does not believe that people over a certain age should receive any care at all? Suppose he believes that we are ruining the world through overpopulation and each family should only have two children? He can decide that the mandatory health care plans do not, any of them, cover any procedures if the patient is over 80 years old. He can decide that only the first two pregnancies will be covered in any of these plans. In a way, he has a kingly power over us.

That's when it began to click for me. We were ruled by ourselves, and our economy was ruled by the natural force of Free-Market Capitalism. Now, increasingly, the vocal minority is clamoring for a "king". They are trying to give our powers and our rights, not to the Federal Government, not to Congress, but specifically to the President and his appointees. Why would they do something like that?

They distrust the free market. The free market is a force that they cannot control. If there is a bad year for tomatoes, they cannot force the price of tomatoes to fall. If they disapprove of people eating beef instead of goat meat, they cannot force the stores to sell goat meat and not beef. (I know I slip into agricultural idioms easily, bear with me please! This goes for other products and services as well.) We conservatives believe that the free market will always act in the best interests of the largest numbers of people. However, the liberals do not like it.

The Israelites felt the same way. Ruled directly by God Himself, they wanted a king. They wanted something more than a force they could not control, who might make decisions of which they disapprove. They wanted a man. God will never tell you that you are allowed to sin. A man may be coaxed to do so. Now I am not comparing God directly to the Free Market, with all the omniscience, omnipotence, and omnipresence that implies. However, God, like the Free Market and all laws of Nature which He created, is constant and will not reward behavior that violates His laws.

This started with the Free Market, but it can be applied to other things. The liberals who push hormonal birth control, abortion, and gay 'marriage' want sex to have no consequences. Natural law created by God says that it must, but they hope to take control and force what is wrong to become right. This requires them to reject God's laws and set up a king to rule over them instead, a man whom they hope to give the power... the power to decide what medical care we can afford to receive, the power to set the price of goods and services, the power to declare by government fiat that old borders to chastity and modesty no longer exist and anyone who supports them deserves to be hated.

This was God's warning when the Israelites demanded a king:

He will take your sons and make them serve with his chariots and horses, and they will run in front of his chariots.  Some he will assign to be commanders of thousands and commanders of fifties, and others to plow his ground and reap his harvest, and still others to make weapons of war and equipment for his chariots. He will take your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers.  He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive groves and give them to his attendants.  He will take a tenth of your grain and of your vintage and give it to his officials and attendants.  Your male and female servants and the best of your cattle and donkeys he will take for his own use.  He will take a tenth of your flocks, and you yourselves will become his slaves.  When that day comes, you will cry out for relief from the king you have chosen, but the LORD will not answer you in that day.”

We might want to keep this in mind as we see those who happily hand their medical privacy and insurance rights to a single unelected man, who seek greater power for human men, all hoping that this path will lead to their being permitted to do that which is against natural law... whether it be to receive without working or engage in acts of depravity with government approval.

What the heck, it's been a month!

I love to write, and I love to write in this blog. However, I just have to come to the conclusion that I will not be able to post daily, and sometimes I might not even be able to post weekly!

On Saturday, I had the pleasure of seeing my brother marry a good woman. My house was Grand Central Station, with several people staying here rather than spending needless money on a hotel room, and several more people meeting up with them to go various places and enjoy various activities. My last houseguests leave today... and then the house will be quiet again.

Even though I am a very introverted person, I also very much enjoy sharing my house and property with other people. When we first bought this place, we felt led by none other than God to make it a pleasant place where other people could find rest. Some people become missionaries, others lead groups, others create new charities... But for every person who goes out there to make something of themselves, you need people who spread the load just a little bit further! For every adventurer, you need an oasis. My husband and I are pretty much devoting our lives to raising our children and maintaining our home in such a way that we can provide an oasis to those who just need a break.

Sometimes I feel guilty that I don't spend enough time pursuing things like writing that 'could make me money someday'. However, I have to keep reminding myself that now, as my kids are young and being homeschooled and we are providing this restful service to those who could use a break, I really am contributing enough to society as it is. The steady, frequent writing will come later.

I still have my entire middle age and elderly years ahead of me.

Benefits without Benefits

I stumbled across an oldie but goodie while reading a discussion of gay marriage. One of the people referred back to this Family Research Center writeup, citing numerous studies and statistics to call into doubt the notion that the typical homosexual relationship is basically just like the typical heterosexual one.

This leads me back to an old SSM argument which claims that being able to legally marry will stabilize gay relationships, and the main reason why gays are so promiscuous and so many of their relationships are so short-lived is because they don't receive the state benefits. Frankly, the early information on the length of gay marriages in countries and states that permit them are not promising.

Gay activists like to pull race into the mix, comparing any disapproval at all with homosexual sex with the kind of racism that once enslaved an entire people. I'd like to pull in the racist angle and give it a bit of a twist.

When blacks were enslaved, they had no rights. They had no legal standing. Nevertheless, they married each other all the time. On 'friendlier' plantations, the master would oversee a pretty little ceremony. On less friendly places, they would hold their ceremonies quietly, but they still married and were given in marriage.

Now when I say that blacks have no rights, I should remind my readers that this went far beyond simply lacking tax status. They had no inheritance, because they could not own property. Furthermore, a master was fully able to sell the wife away from the husband, or their children away from their parents. The environment was not simply unfriendly to marriage among the black slaves. It was downright hostile.

And yet despite this, the marriages prospered. When slavery first ended and the Civil Rights era began, the family values of the black culture put white culture to shame. Marriages lasted.

It is clear to me that the simple legal acknowledgement of a relationship as "marriage" is not what lends stability. Marriage is a term that is not so much defined as derived. It is the inherent qualities of marriage, the hormonal/chemical/physical/emotional/psychological workings of a sexually exclusive, opposite-sex couple that makes marriage what it is. Slapping the label on a group known for their promiscuity and short-term relationships will not transform them into upstanding pillars of family values.

So much for resolutions...

Of course I haven't posted in a while now. It seems that "real life" continues to intervene! For today, I have a piece that I wrote in response to a forum thread. The conversation shifted to various economic responses to various tax cuts and government spending.

The first gem was the reminder that the "Clinton Surplus" was created by a Republican Congress and finally passed after Clinton stonewalled it so hard that the entire government shut down for several weeks. In this post, I went into the reasons behind the recent economic problems and their results.

This is what happened in 2006:

Shortly after the Democrats swept Congress, there was a bursting of a gas bubble. Not a physical bubble, but an economic one. Refinery problems plus Middle East concerns plus an increased integration of ethanol worked together to bring gas prices up. Food prices followed quickly. Whenever gas prices go up, food prices go up, because grocery stores work on a shoestring budget. They make almost no profit. So when it costs more to transport food to the store, the items cost more.

Now in 1977, the Community Reinvestment Act was passed by a Democrat majority Congress and signed into law by President Jimmy Carter. The CRA had good intentions... to end the practice of redlining, or refusing to sell homes in certain areas to minorities. However, it basically involved sending the government into real estate to enact something very much like Affirmative Action. It didn't impact us much, though, for nearly 20 years, because it didn't have much teeth.

That changed under President Clinton, who empowered Reno to set things into motion that would punish banks that didn't make enough loans to minorities who wanted to buy homes. The only problem was that the reason why fewer minorities were buying homes was because fewer minorities had the financial means and acumen to hold down a mortgage. The banks were ordered to make it work somehow, and the bank response was the Subprime Mortgage.

The Subprime Mortgage, like the Saltbox and the SUV, was something created by private industry trying to keep what they wanted/needed while skirting Federal regulations. In all three cases, you ended up with something that didn't have all of the advantages of what the government wanted to force or what the private groups originally used. (The SUV is a replacement for the Station Wagon that not only fails to meet sedan fuel economy, but it fails to approach station wagon fuel economy as well. The Saltbox has a partial upper story with a roof that drops to the first story on one side, resulting in a loss of useable space.)

These subprime loans were snapped up by people for whom they were and were not originally intended, creating a heavy demand for new and expensive housing. People who would have been steered towards a starter home were using subprimes to afford twice the house they would have purchased otherwise. We had a housing bubble. W Bush sounded the alarm multiple times, but Frank and Dodd staunchly refused to look into it. All of these subprime home owners were barely managing to make their finances work, and the slightest rise in any of their other bills would lead to disaster.

Then, of course, as mentioned above, the oil price went up. That started a comprehensive collapse that ended in failing banks, foreclosures/abandonments, and rampant unemployment in the construction industry. Unfortunately, instead of isolating this disaster and allowing it to burn itself out, Obama decided to ramp up federal spending, and now it's affecting private sectors that had nothing to do whatsoever with construction or mortgages.

And now the fix, being basically the "You still have to provide mortgages for minorities whether they can afford them or not, but you can't do it this way", is making it nigh impossible for smaller businesses to operate through lack of liquidity. The government we-can't-allow-banks-to-fail mindset has brought to a full stop the natural process of stronger banks buying weaker ones and fixing the problems naturally. Did you know that, at the beginning of the recession, if you had been saving up a little money during the good times, you could have any home renovation done well on the cheap? Before Obama intervened in hopes of getting people to refinance their mortgages, refinancing was easy and very useful. We did it ourselves. Now it's all but impossible unless you fit the narrow and confusing government standards.

Gas prices also started to fall as demand fell, but now the weak dollar plus inflation (both the result of government spending) kept prices up and are now primarily responsible for the current spike. Of course, every part of this, from an end to free checking (next month, I believe, part of Obamacare) to the 50-100% rise in basic food prices, to the tightening of loans and resulting unemployment, is impacting primarily the poor and the middle class.

In short, the particular Democrats who swept Congress in 2006 (aside from Dodd/Frank and other members of the Old Guard) really were no more responsible for the beginning of the recession than W Bush was for the tech bubble burst and 9/11. It's what they've done with it since that has landed us in the Pit of Despair.

Responsibility for education

In Florida, a State Representative has proposed increasing parental involvement in childhood education by having public school teachers grade the parents. Of course, there are many angles in describing the problems with this proposal. A friend of mine who is a Florida-certified to teach and knows the local public schools told me that the parents should be the ones grading the teachers.

On the plus side, the proposal does address a problem that is very real in today's society. Too many parents don't have enough involvement in their children's education. The question in my mind is, will this proposal solve or worsen the problem? I believe that it is a treatment of a symptom rather than the ending of a societal disease.

In Harper Lee's To Kill A Mockingbird, young Scout does not take easily to school. Her teacher is appalled when she discovers that Scout knows not only how to read, but how to write cursive. Her father has spent so much time reading with her in the evenings, and her housekeeper copied out words for her to practice when she wanted something to do. The teacher is adamant that this is wrong.

"Now you tell your father not to teach you any more. It's best to begin reading with a fresh mind. You tell him I'll take over from here and try to undo the damage-"                                                               
"Ma'am?"                                                                 
 "Your father does not know how to teach. You can have a seat now."

This book was published in 1960 and referred to the rise of new teaching methods including the much-lampooned "New Math" in public school systems. The adjoining message, naturally, was that these methods would be compromised if all these parents kept thinking that they could do the job of teaching their children how to learn. The movement coincided with the Feminist Movement, which championed pushing mothers, against their will if necessary, to leave their child-rearing and climb the career ladder.

Combine these two together and you have, nurtured for about 50 years by the Liberal Left, the belief that it is the job of parents to work outside the home while leaving the matter of their children's education in the hands of government officials and "properly-trained" instructors. I note that one of the biggest questions I hear as a homeschooling mother is, "How do you know that you're qualified to teach your child?" Before the '60's and its various revolutions, such a question would have been downright laughable. Who is better qualified to teach a child than the people whose genetics created him or her?

Of course, as with many such reforms, we are now discovering that parental involvement does in fact have a strongly positive effect on a child's education. What is the solution? Although Representative Stargel is listed as a Republican, she offers the very liberal proposal that the Government, having discouraged parents from involvement, must now mandate parental involvement for the exact same reason... the good of the children. This is worse than the purported ambulance-in-the-valley solution for the lack of fence on the dangerous cliff. This is tantamount to removing an already-present fence on the cliff before instituting the ambulance in the valley.

Becoming Rich Pt. 2

In my last post, I discussed the first of a couple of principles that will aid you in the process of becoming rich. The second is like it, and is best described in Heinlein's book, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress. The principle is known as "TANSTAAFL", said as one oddly-pronounced word. It is an acronym that stands for "There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch."

What does this mean for the person who is becoming rich? Simply this: Aside from a very few insanely lucky people, it will not happen quickly, and it will not happen without effort. Get-quick-rich schemes either depend on such vanishing statistical chance that they cannot in any way be depended upon, or require of you a price that you may not realize that you are about to pay.

I was tempted by offers of a $1,000 or even $2,000 shopping spree at a national electronics chain. All I had to do was to sign up for a certain number of free or almost-free offers. It was easy money, wasn't it? Not necessarily. I knew from the experiences of others that you would have to remember, personally, to cancel the various offers before you had anywhere from nine to fifteen companies charging you $10-20/month for their services. Actually getting these offers canceled is often a real pain, because many of these companies are less than scrupulous. They will take up your time trying to convince you to stay, and then mysteriously lose your cancellation paperwork to get everything out of you that they can. These offers also often involve you signing away the right for them to sell your information to other companies. One of these shopping sprees can result in a huge overflow of junk mail for years to come.

In other words, the price for the offer was my privacy, along with a great deal of time and energy that in retrospect would be more burdensome than simply finding a job that paid $20/hr and working full-time for about a week and a half. TANSTAAFL.

I have a third principle, and liberals will not want to believe this one, because it undercuts their preferred form of aid to the poor. The principle is this: Spend the money that you earned. Earn the money that you spend. This will aid you greatly in becoming rich.

When people do manage to 'hit the jackpot' and become rich quick, it is almost always temporary. Give them a few weeks to a few years, depending on the dollar amount, and they will be just as poor as before. I have heard it said that if wealth was collected and distributed utterly equally, both property and money, within a generation all the wealth would be back where it was. Why is this?

Human beings value things based on the cost to acquire them. When your riches come to you by your own efforts, you are more likely to be careful with them. If you spent five hours digging ditches to get your check, you are less likely to toss it away on frivolities. Money in and of itself has no value. It's cotton and linen and dyes. The number stamped on it is more or less an arbitrary marking. The reason why it has value to you is because it represents those hours of sweat and aches, and it can be exchanged for a good meal and soft, safe place to sleep.

When people receive money through no effort of their own, through winning a huge prize or being handed it readily by faceless government officials, the money does not represent their hard work. It does not represent hours spent out in the sun, or days of frustrating problem-solving. It has little or no value, and the riches they purchase also mean little to them. What if your television breaks? Buy another! Break it out of pique and buy another! It cost you no effort. It cost you no pain, no determination, no struggle.

Now there are exceptions. Some people who win the lottery do manage their money wisely. Some people who receive aid do invest and use it wisely. By the great majority, however, you should not wish for instant riches if you want to become rich. You should wish instead for the slow and steady path, for the accumulation over years, for the knowledge that every time you are knocked down, you can get back up and start again on the path to becoming rich. Becoming rich, like aging fine wine, is more about the process than the result.

My own family is following this path.We have had downturns and upturns, but over all we are on a slow but steady path to the Middle Class. We take care of the things we own, because they cost us dearly in time and effort to accumulate. We save when we can, spend when we must, and reduce where we can. I used to think that it would be wonderful to win the lottery or suddenly have our mortgage debt randomly forgiven. Now I am beginning to see that such 'blessings' may turn out to be a curse. When we have won our way, we will do so by our own efforts, with our own skills, and our wealth will mean something to us.

May it be for everyone. Then everyone can become truly rich.

Becoming Rich

Thomas Sowell has an excellent article up today about rich people and how they got that way. This is not going to be the exact topic of my post today, but it's worth a read.

I learned a lot from my uncle, my mother's sister's husband. Though he is not related to me by blood, he might as well be. One of the few solidly INTJ people in the world, like me, he was able to help me understand how people like me can move through the world without breaking us... or it. One of the most important things he taught me was how to become rich.

Now, I chose my words very carefully. "Becoming" rich is not the same as "being" rich. The method doesn't guarantee any particular measure of wealth in any particular time. It merely ensures that you will remain on the road of improvement, and you will be better off than the way that you were.

These days, advice about life and work tends to be the kind of advice you'd expect from a very wealthy society. "Find out what makes you happy. Settle for nothing less." That is all very well and good when all businesses are booming and the world is full of friendly bosses just looking for the next CEO. Such environments, though, are historically very rare and unusual, existing only in small parts of the world for mere years or decades at a time. You can't rely on them, especially in this economy.

Of course it's a good thing to find out what makes you happy and strive towards it. Rush Limbaugh encourages his listeners to find what makes you happy and then find out how to make money doing it. He cites that as the secret to his success. It's not the only secret, though, and it is not the most important if what you want is to become rich.

Now let me explain my terms once again. People hear the phrase "become rich" and they think that you're automatically talking about turning from minimum-wage poverty to, well, Rush Limbaugh wealthy. Not everybody is going to do that. Not everybody actually wants it, no matter what they think. By the time I'm done explaining this, you'll understand why. However, if you are in dire straits, you do not have to become rich for your entire life. You only have to do it until you are closer to where you want to be.

The first principle to becoming richer is to do anything (within moral standing) that will get you paid. Nowadays there are too many young people who believe that a certain job is beneath them. They graduate with big-sounding degrees, and they've learned to believe that they should only have to work within their specialty. You can't have this mindset if you want to become richer. If you are searching for a job, you should be willing to take what comes your way. My father has worked as an electronics technician, a system designer, a laser builder... and a carpenter for a cabinet company.

My uncle has told me that he has trouble understanding why some people claim that they are just plain unable to get a job. He taught me that you can get a job as long as you're willing to do anything for pay and let enough people know about it. It may be dirty and unpleasant. You may be digging ditches, or working in a factory. Still, it will be work, and you will get paid. There will be times in your life when that will be the most important thing you can do just to keep yourself and your family going.

Now once you've got that job, you can work your way up. You can find out what you enjoy and try to make money doing it. But the first step is to simply get a job, any job that will feed you, or at least help you make ends meet. You may have to lower your expectations, especially in a poor economy. You may have to lower your standard of living for a time. If you want to survive, however, there will be times in your life when  you simply have to take what you can get. That dirty, tiring job should be viewed, not as a disgrace, but as the beginning of your rise.

Taxing Riches

What tipped the scales for me when I voted for John McCain in the 2008 election? Certainly his appointment of Sarah Palin, a mother of five who bought diapers at Walmart and wasn’t afraid to hunt for food, helped his case. I am a conservative mother, and I identify with her. However, the real decision was made during the debate hosted by Rick Warren in which McCain refused to set an arbitrary dollar amount as the dividing line between rich and poor.

“Some of the richest people I've ever known in my life are the most unhappy,” he said, following Obama’s description of ‘rich’ as making $250K/year. “I think that rich should be defined by a home, a good job, an education and the ability to hand to our children a more prosperous and safer world than the one that we inherited.” The important part, however, the part that I wish all conservatives would memorize, is his next sentence:

“I don't want to take any money from the rich — I want everybody to get rich.”

I have realized that this was one of the greatest reasons why I staunchly oppose the liberal mindset. The liberals have set up “the rich” in order to bear the burden of their great society, built by directing cash flow from the producers to the non-producers in defiance of all the laws of nature. In setting up “the rich” for this burden, they must first define “the rich”, and every attempt to do so has led to disaster.

In this Great Recession, I have been lucky. My husband has not been laid off. However, we were notified last week that all employees in the company were going to undergo a temporary salary reduction. For whatever reason, they cannot bear the costs during this quarter. Their clients, however, cannot bear the drop in productivity. What was first going to be recompense as paid vacation is now going to be delivered to us as a bonus at the beginning of the next quarter.

As soon as I heard this, I groaned. I also used to work full-time, and the very first thing I learned regarding my salary was to never take accumulated vacation time as a monetary bonus. As soon as I heard the word ‘bonus’, I immediately knew that nearly half of the temporarily-docked pay would be lost to us for the rest of the year. Why?

Somewhere along the line, someone decided that the rich get bonuses. Therefore, bonus tax withholding should be calculated differently. Bonuses are taxed at a flat percentage, regardless of your financial situation. Once Social Security and other taxes are added on, you invariably find yourself with only about half of the original amount. Of course, the rich can weather a blow like this. A lower-middle-class family has very little stretch in the monthly budget, and paying back only half of a salary reduction puts a very real strain on the finances.

State luxury taxes provide a similar problem. By defining certain activities and property as ‘rich’, luxury taxes become a self-fulfilling prophecy, lifting these activities and property out of the reach of the middle class who may be willing to sacrifice in other areas of their lives in order to enjoy just one of these ‘luxuries’. The idea is the same; the liberals have decided that use of a certain good or service defines you as ‘rich’, and they who claim to bring opportunity to the poor end up forbidding it.

Property tax is yet another method by which those who define ‘rich’ end up snaring the poor and middle class. I live in a rural area, in which you will hear the phrase “Land-rich, money-poor”. This is not by any means a new problem. Property tax was a very early method of funding the government. It too, however, defines someone as ‘rich’, this time by looking at the size of their house or land. The New England Saltbox is an architectural design created in order to reduce taxes in a time when your house value was calculated by how many floors were in your home. By extending the roofline to the top of the first floor on one side of the house (usually the back), builders created the look and usefulness of a two-story house that was taxed as one. Measures like this were necessary for some families. Wealth is not the only reason to own a large house. The families with many children, typically poorer than the average, are hit hardest by large house taxes. Farmers are hit hardest by property tax determined by acreage.

As time goes on, I realize more and more the folly of a tax system that targets the "rich", due to the problems that arise from defining the line between "rich" and "poor". I am beginning to believe that perhaps the only method of taxation that can encourage growth and wealth is a flat income or sales tax percentage across the board.

Setting the record straight

One of the plagues of the Internet is that anyone can be an expert on anything. Some sites are better at vetting their content than others. Unfortunately, "about.com" is not one of them. Oh, there are good articles on the site. If you trawl through enough trash, you will almost always find something valuable. As my readers have probably guessed, it is part of that 'trash' that irks me today.

I'm here to set the record straight.

The article purported to be a review of the computer game Sims 3, written by someone who seems to have played the game for all of ten minutes and may not have even had a legal copy. That's a serious charge to make, I am aware. Why would I make it? The review was dated in December of 2010 and gave the game a low score for world customization. The reviewer claimed that the game did not even give you the object placement options of Sims 2. He (or she, as the case may be) did acknowledge that there is a tool on the Sims 3 website called "Create-A-World", but he had never touched it, so he was not including it in his review.

Something that sets Sims 3 apart from previous Sims games is its updating feature. Other Sims games did deliver patches and updates, but none of the updates ever included any new content. They largely addressed bugs and issues. In Sims 3, however, if all you purchase and own is the vanilla game, the updates will give you a few of the new abilities included in the expansion packs. The update that came out with Sims 3 World Adventures allowed you to build basements, even if you did not purchase adventures. The update for Ambitions gave your sim a few extra personality traits, such as "Vehicle Enthusiast", which gives your sim extra happiness if his car is a particularly nice one. Now here is the important part when dealing with the faulty review: Sims 3 Late Night was released in late October, and its corresponding update allowed us to add and delete lots and objects. In other words, it gave us the exact same functionality as we had in Sims 2, and anyone who had installed and registered/updated a genuine copy of the vanilla game in December of 2010 would have seen it.

Secondly, it was a really bad move to give Sims 3 a low score for world customization without even looking at the Create-A-World tool, especially if the writer is going to complain about the worlds being less customizable than in Sims 2. He should have either included the tool in his review or not commented on the world creation features. In Sims 2, there was no Create-A-World tool. Instead, you were able to work with the terrain and road placement only if you owned a copy of Simcity 4, and your custom neighborhood only imported properly if you followed exactly a rather capricious set of rules. The "city" had to be of a certain size, and anything in it had to follow certain rules of placement. Of course, Simcity 4 was not free, meaning that any neighborhood customization aside from placing trees and lots required you to spend an extra $30-50.

Sims 3 Create-A-World, on the other hand, is a free tool downloaded from the website. It is designed to work with Sims 3, so it is very good at vetting its worlds and ensuring that they will import easily and accurately. It also is a true world-builder, in which you can start with either a height map or a plain stretch of land and add every single thing included in any proper Sims 3 world. It provides you with terrain sculpting, painting, routing information, object placement, road placement, lot placement, and even collectible object spawners. It runs a streamlined version of Sims 3 in which you can do lot-building that remains in the world, allowing you to release something just as complete and sophisticated as the worlds that come with the game, minus the actual Sim families residing in the actual houses.

Basically, with Sims 3 Create-A-World, Sims 3 worlds become far more customizable than Sims 2 ever had, and with the late October update, even the vanilla Sims 3 game provides you with the customizing capability of Sims 2.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to make my own world... let's have a mountain here and a beachfront over here...

How do you love your enemies?

I read a frustrated person's question this morning. The topic was a common topic these days: the Arizona shooting and the question of civility in politics. I have heard questions like this one before, and decided that I'd best address it. The question is basically, "How are we supposed to love someone like Nancy Pelosi or Barack Obama?"

It would be all too easy to do as the rest of the world, most of which would excuse someone for hating the person who already shows unreserved hatred for you. That is because of the "Golden Rule", a twisted and misunderstood belief that "treat others as you would like to be treated" means that harsh treatment of others can be justified by their actions towards you. In today's bizarre morality, you are vindicated for being a jerk to a jerk.

God, however, asks for something grander and deeper. He asks for us to treat others as you would like to be treated, regardless of the way they treat you. He wants us to learn to love our enemy and do good to those who hate us. What does that mean for us today? Some say that we cannot say anything unkind or express any dissatisfaction with those with whom we disagree. Yesterday, on a popular radio show, the host was told that he was not being Christlike when he railed against the actions of Obama or Pelosi. However, Jesus referred to the Pharisees as "whitewashed graves" and "brood of vipers". What does this mean?

Jesus has always had a heart for the lost sinner. During His time on this earth, He was not ashamed to pardon tax collectors and prostitutes. He raised up the fallen, gave rest to the weary, and was gentle to the humble. However, He reserved some pretty choice words for the religious/political leaders who were leading His people astray. Given that, it is hard to believe that Jesus would never have us speak out against oppression, evil, and sin.

So what does it mean to love someone to whom you are politically opposed?

The next time you start to rail against Obama or Pelosi, keep track of your language and what you say. Are you wishing them harm, directly? Or are you wishing for an end to their harmful actions towards you? Are you mocking them to tear them down, or are you hoping that they will listen and turn? What are your motives? It is all too easy to turn human men and women into demons in your own mind. The best of us have a bit of the Devil in them, and the worst of us have a bit of God in them.

I wrote a post earlier this month doubting Obama's Christianity. Nobody could say that I am sweet and easy on him or Pelosi, whom I have accused of terrible ills. However, I can say truly that I would not wish violence or suffering on either of them. I would, in my anger, wish that Obama was impeached or that Pelosi decided to retire. I would speak out strongly against what they are doing to this country. I can do this without holding actual hatred in my heart for either of them.

Ask yourself this: If Obama had a sudden turning-around, if he suddenly experienced a revival of Christian thought and deed, if he eschewed his hateful language and swore to do better, if he apologized for his actions and sought your forgiveness, would you give it to him? Of course you might be cautious at first. So would I. But if he earnestly sought to undo the harm and his apology was genuine, would you hold back due to your anger with him? Would you refuse forgiveness so that you could see him suffer? Or would you welcome him gladly and rejoice that one more has been recovered?

To those who ask how to keep from hating Obama and Pelosi, I say this: First, do not wish them harm in your anger. Do not wish for a creatively painful death for them. Do not call any diseases or medical conditions upon them. I say this doubly to the Christians, because our words may have power and we are responsible for that power.

Secondly, be certain in your heart that you would accept them willingly should they repent and return. I'm using religious language here for a political process, so let me be clear... your fellow Christian is your brother or sister even if he or she disagrees with your politics. My point is that, whether it be politics or religion, any hesitation to welcome them in should be borne only of caution, and not a desire for revenge or refusal to forgive.

Equality of what, exactly?

I am a member of the Ladies Against Feminism group. As such, I have joined their Facebook page and often read and reply to the people there. I wanted to take one of my answers today and expand it for the edification for anyone who reads this blog.

One self-proclaimed feminist wrote the following (excerpt): "A real feminist believes women should have all the same choices as men do. However, the fact that most people who do choose to stay at home are women obviously says something. it cannot in every case be a choice or else 50% of stay at home parents would be men."

Now this falls into an error that feminists and liberals (the two groups often overlap) both follow. This error is defining equal opportunity as equal outcomes.

This nation was created in order to give each of us equal opportunity, and it has historically succeeded admirably. Anyone is allowed to start their own business. Anyone is allowed to work his way up, to find a way to pay for higher education, to transcend the social and economic class into which he.. or she.. was born. If you have a dream, America is the place to be. You will have no better luck in any other country.

Now of course, all human beings have different dreams. Many dream of simply having a safe, comfortable life. Some want to invent something new. Others want to heal anyone they can help. Still others simply want to accumulate wealth. It is a delight to me to ask people what they dream of doing and encourage them to take steps towards that end. I know one young man who merely wants to be the best teacher of history, the one who gives untold students a love for knowledge of the past. I knew one middle-aged woman, a data entry worker, who wished she was repairing, refurbishing, and selling antique furniture on Long Island. Walk down any street and understand that those houses hide (or display, depending on the house) all sorts of fascinating professions and hobbies. I've seen an entire basement taken up by a beautifully intricate, lifelike model railroad running its tracks through mountainous villages and a miniature city. I married the son of the man who invented the Auto-Reverse for the cassette tape deck.

What's my point? Well, if each person is a dynamic, living person with hopes and dreams, then not everyone is going to have the same dream and not everyone is going to have the same hope. Not everyone will want to be a doctor, and not everyone will want to be a carpenter. The last thing I would expect from equal opportunities is equal outcomes, because not everyone values the same things. One person will be utterly happy with a part-time job, an old trailer, and the ability to take three-hour walks daily. Another will prize money over time. Yet another will gladly give up all his money to be surrounded by children. If we are forced to have equal outcomes, we cannot have equal opportunity.

Back to our feminist talker of the day. "It cannot in every case be a choice or else 50% of stay at home parents would be men," she asserts. Is this true? A Pew research poll in 2007 showed that only 21% of full-time working mothers and 16% of stay-at-home mothers believe that full-time work is ideal for them. On the other hand, 72% of working fathers believe that working full-time is the best situation for them. Why would someone believe that equal opportunity to make your own choice would result in a 50/50 split of homemaker men and women, when over 70% of fathers prefer to work full-time and about 20% of mothers prefer the same?

Personally, ideally, I would think that equal opportunity would result in 100% of working mothers feeling that full-time work is ideal for them, and 0% of the stay-at-home mothers feeling that full-time work is ideal for them. Of course, we don't live in an ideal world, and, as our feminist of the day pointed out, not everyone has the ability to choose what he or she prefers in the area of homemaking versus working outside the home. So what should be done to make that choice more available?

Most feminists believe that more women should be pushed out of the homemaking sphere, by force if necessary, in order to ensure that they have equality through equal outcomes. I believe that equality comes through opportunity, and that true choice will result in the majority of women feeling that they are in their ideal situation. Given that 84% of stay-at-home women are in their ideal situation and only 21% of working mothers feel the same way, my analysis is that any method of coercion, any oppression of choices, is happening due to the feminist 'remedy'.

Bread and milk runs

This week, we're going to have nasty winter weather almost every day except for today. That means that today I had to go out and do our shopping. Unfortunately, anyone in the New England area (and surrounding) can tell us exactly what I ran into... the Bread and Milk Runs.

Now this is a Northern phenomenon that happens whenever winter weather is expected. People flock to the stores to prepare by buying extra supplies in the necessities, usually milk or bread.

I dislike being rushed in the grocery store. I don't like being swarmed. It's not easy at all to wait in a long line with an eight-year-old and a toddler. So how do I avoid the bread and milk runs?

I know that some people live in very small apartments and can't put this into effect. I grew up among the "land-rich money-poor", and my parents have always had a cellar, as have the parents of most of my childhood acquaintances. It was considered normal to put up a couple of shelf sets and store extra food down there where it was cool and reasonably dry.

I only have one shelf set and I need another. Still, I do have a space down in the cellar which is used exclusively for extra food. I keep on hand enough food to have a varied and pleasant diet for at least a week and a half, and enough to just plain eat for at least two months. I never had it any other way, so I don't know what it's like to have it any other way.

If it's at all possible for you, I would recommend that you my readers keep a sufficient cache of food that you don't ever need to do a bread-and-milk run in the face of bad weather. Develop a list of the items you use most often, shelf-stable staples like pasta and rice, and watch for local sales. Buy three times what you need whenever it's on sale. Not only will you avoid the dreaded crowded panic shoppers, you will find that you spend less on food than you used to.

Oppression

This occurred to me this morning, though it really should've occurred to me sooner. In the midst of all this upset over who's to blame, over talk radio, over Mein Kampf, etc. I came across this:

On NPR’s All Things Considered Wednesday, commentator Daisy Hernandez (who’s no relation to POTUS-designated American hero Daniel Hernandez) discussed her immediate fears upon hearing of the shootings in Tucson: she was keenly interested in knowing the shooting suspect’s surname.

For Hernandez, hearing the name Loughner, not “Ramirez, Gonzalez or Garcia” prompted a wave of “Brown relief”–a feeling that the Latino community had been spared a certain media firestorm that would have forced the immigration debate onto the nation’s front burner:





Now this is being touted in the liberal side of the internet media as a sign that Arizona's immigration law is bad. We're being terrible to these people. We're oppressing them. They're afraid. They hear about the gunman and instantly say, "I hope the shooter isn't Hispanic."

This is an understandable fear for any group that deals with any level of persecution. When a white man is murdered in the inner city, there's a population that says, "I hope the shooter wasn't black." When a bomb blows up near a mall, I'm sure there's a population that says, "I hope the perpetrator wasn't Muslim." They worry about the backlash if the perpetrator is found to be one of them.

When I first heard of this shooting, my first thought was not "I hope the perpetrator wasn't TEA Party." My first thought wasn't, "I hope the perpetrator wasn't conservative." My first thought was:

I hope the victim isn't a Democrat.

I knew that if the victim was a Democrat, it wouldn't matter if the perpetrator was from Mars. Groups of people fear criminals among them if they are being oppressed by people who will punish the whole for the actions of one. But what does that say about a group that fears the victim being one of the oppressors, because it will result in them being blamed no matter who the perpetrator was?

It isn't that often that a bully creates enough fear that his victims already knew that they were going to suffer if anything happened to him, regardless of the actual identity of the perpetrator. Shouldn't that be discussed, if we're going to talk about civility and hatred?

Expansion desired

When Bernie and I first married, we decided that we would like to have three children altogether. Well, I did the deciding, really. I said I wanted three. He said he definitely at least wanted two. I didn't worry over it. I didn't feel the need to compromise, or debate. I was diagnosed at age 20 with Stage II endometriosis and I didn't even know if I could have children.

My husband's mindset changed with the birth of our daughter. Oh, he was very happy and helpful with the birth of our son, but it was a stressful time for us, financially, and that gave him worries about how he was going to care for his family. Now he's settling into a more secure position, and we're doing alright. Before our daughter, he said he definitely wanted one or two children. Now he joins me in saying that he definitely wants three... maybe even four!

When we purchased this house, it must have seemed silly for a young couple to pick up a four-bedroom bi-level. This house is both big and small at the same time. It's a very good house for people. It can hold probably five, maybe even six at the peak of its comfort level. We bought it knowing that we wanted several children, and we still do.

Of course, then reality intrudes. I had to work full-time while my husband dealt with an education issue and got himself a steady job that allowed me to return home. I was under tremendous stress and could not carry a pregnancy. Thanks to that, the age gap between my son and daughter is greater than I'd hoped. They are six years apart. I'm starting to creep close to age 35, when fertility drops and pregnancy starts becoming dangerous.

We still want a third baby.

Those of you who read this and pray, do pray that it may be in God's will to bless us a third time. We are doing what we can, and it's way too early to think that we might be having any difficulty, as we're only on our second cycle of attempting. But do please feel free to pray. Sooner is better, in my opinion, but I will take what God gives me, when He gives it to me, and have faith.

I do believe that God did not give us a four-bedroom house just so that we could have two children and then stop.

Yay for snow days!

Yes, I did want to update this blog daily this year if I could, with the exception of Sundays. Yes, I didn't update on Wednesday. Yes, I'm going to backdate this entry to fill it the gap.

So what happened?

In Connecticut, we broke our record for the greatest amount of snow in a 24-hour period when 18-24 inches (depending on location) fell around the state, with some places totaling 30 inches altogether. At my home, we got an even 20.

My son went out playing in the snow with my mother. I didn't take my daughter out at all, but she's going out in it today now that the driveway is plowed out. See, yesterday, the snow was as high as she was and there was simply no place for her to walk!

How did we weather the storm? Well, I always keep a good supply of food on hand, because my area is sufficiently rural that going out to the store all the time is a real pain. Our power went out, but my electric company deserves great praise for fixing it pretty promptly. They had trucks out within an hour and fixed the problem an hour and a half after it went out. This is good for us, because we have no source of heat that is not electric-dependent. We have an oil furnace that is lit, not by pilot light, but by electric spark.

Our gorgeous little bi-level doesn't really have room for a woodstove, or you'd better believe I would have one in this house. I know how to deal with woodstoves. I grew up with one. Unfortunately, we are going to have to find some other method by which to (someday) heat our home when the power goes out. I believe our best bet now is to find a generator, as that would give us water as well.

Politics and shootings

The media craziness about Rep. Gifford's shooting has reached a new level. At this point, if I was asked to identify the mentally disturbed person in the story, I don't know if I'd pick the shooter or several of the major news media outlets. That is frightening.

Of course everyone has got something to say about this, and I'm no exception, so I'm just going to toss out a few thoughts on the tragedy.

1. To the news media: If the TEA Party birthed a violent revolutionary who decided to shoot and kill just one political opponent, even just one of our political opponents who was also a Congressman, it sure as heck wouldn't be some Arizona representative whose name I never even heard until this tragedy. We wouldn't be going after a Blue Dog moderate who voted against Obama on almost every issue, voted against Pelosi as minority leader, and supported the Arizona laws on immigration.

2. The leftists are pursuing a false dichotomy. They announce that the shooter was a conservative crazy and then claim that the only way for us to refute it is to prove that he was a liberal crazy. I even heard one fellow make the remarkable claim that the shooter once called someone a terrorist for having an abortion, therefore he was unquestionably a TEA Party Conservative Palin Supporter. Look, guys, this is like saying that a man has brown hair unless you can prove that it's blonde. There are more than two colors to choose from here.

3. "This just proves that political rhetoric should be kinder and gentler, like it used to be." Since when? This claim is being made by people who apparently never had a comprehensive history class, and used to justify yet another push for the return of the un-"Fairness Doctrine", which says that the liberal viewpoint must make up 80% of the news media, 95% of the state-run education system, and 50% of talk radio. So to what kinder, gentler era do they want to revert our political rhetoric? Back when politicians used to settle their arguments with duels and fistfights? Are they aware that the distances between people during Congressional talk was set so that they were out of sword's reach of each other? Is that where they want to return us?

4. It was a surveying symbol on Palin's map, not a crosshairs. If you want to blame the rhetoric of targeting symbols used to drive crazy people to murder, look to the Democrats and their bullseye map. It's worth noting also that only days before this tragedy, multiple liberal constituents weighed in on Daily Kos to exclaim that their congresswoman was "DEAD to me" for having not voted for Pelosi as minority leader.

5. What is it about Mein Kampf and the Communist Manifesto that nearly every non-Muslim terrorist nut in the past however many years has been a fan? Are these books our modern-day equivalent of Sauron's One Ring, in some way inherently corrupting to all who read it? Or are they just the most accessible materials of the sort that crazy people might use to justify their actions? If we're going to look into shutting up Rush Limbaugh for the sake of someone who went off the rails after favoring socialist and fascist fundamentals, isn't it time to ask libraries to consider banning these books for our own safety? (I ask this tongue-in-cheek. I do not support a ban.)

6. Above all, please remember what this poor woman was nearly killed for: She refused to answer, at a town meeting, the question, "How do you know words mean anything?"

That was it. That is what started it.

What political persuasion asks questions like that? Where is that on Palin's website? Where is it on Pelosi's website?

This was a madman, pure and simple.

Death Panels explained: Part 1

I've been hearing people claim that, without Obamacare, there will be medical scarcity. The truth is that Obamacare artificially creates medical scarcity. Granted, the current way Medicaid and Medicare are run already artificially creates a certain level of medical scarcity. Obamacare just makes it worse.

The new phrase to learn is "Pay for Performance". This is something that has been implemented privately already within some hospitals and publicly with some state-run programs. This is how it works: When the P4P group reimburses the doctor, they look at his rating. The rating is used as a modifier to decide how much he is reimbursed. This rating may be created in many different ways, but Obamacare has a specific means in mind.

Obamacare, I must add, reserves this wonderful new measure for Medicare and Medicaid.

Medicare and Medicaid are already notorious for under-compensating the doctors. If a Medicare patient goes to the doctor with a bad cough and is charged, say, $150 for the visit, Medicare will pay the doctor, on average, about $50-70. If our private insurance companies did that, then the doctor would charge us the other $80-100. However, in Medicare and Medicaid, the doctor is not permitted to make any effort towards regaining his lost income. Now, most doctors do not work with a profit margin of 60% of their intake. Therefore, all Medicaid and Medicare patients provide a loss.

This is, by the way, why doctor's offices will only take a certain number of Medicare or Medicaid patients. This is why it's hard for them to find doctors. Each doctor can only afford to take so much of a loss before he risks bankruptcy. Only a small percentage of his patients can come from Medicare or Medicaid.

Now P4P will create a rating for each doctor that is based nearly entirely on his cost effectiveness. What does this mean? Suppose a 95-year-old woman needs a knee replacement to remain mobile. She has two choices: Have the operation and stay on her feet, or consign herself to a wheelchair for the rest of her life. Usually, she would make that decision depending on affordability versus usefulness, and she would make it based on her own beliefs and ideals. If she is a sedentary woman, she may find the wheelchair to be an easier path, but if she is an active runner, she might think that it is worth any cost to give her that ability back again.

In Obamacare, however, if she has that operation and then dies of pneumonia 18 months later, her operation is deemed to have not been cost-effective and her doctor's score goes down.

That score is used along with a multiplier to decide how much the doctor gets paid by Medicare or Medicaid patients. If he refuses to do the operation for her, he keeps a Grade A rating and may receive something like $100, or maybe even $120, for the $150 office visits. If he does it, however, his rating drops and his reimbursement does as well, for every Medicare or Medicaid patient he takes.

Why on earth would anybody set up something like that? The problem is that liberals do not understand why the doctor makes the medical decisions that he makes. See, there really is a mild problem with doctors over-prescribing and over-treating certain situations. For instance, a patient with bronchitis is likely to be able to clear it up with his own immune system inside of a week or two. However, the doctor is likely now to prescribe antibiotics whether he needs them or not. Why?

The current system of malpractice suits allows anyone who can convince a judge that he has been wronged by his doctor to sue, not only for damages, but for 'pain and suffering' as well. Suppose that doctor does not give out the antibiotics, and tells the patient to return within a week or if certain systems develop. Suppose that patient doesn't see the doctor in a week and gets worse and worse, until he has to come in and receive an emergency course of antibiotics for, say, $800 all told. Now he can sue that doctor for $800 in costs and $10K, or maybe $100K, or any arbitrary number, for pain and suffering.

The Republican answer to this problem was a proposal to cap pain and suffering malpractice payments and to set up a special court system allowing people with medical knowledge to judge whether or not the doctor did the wrong thing. That's because the Republicans understood that the reason why doctors over-treat is because of fear of lawsuit.

Obama told us a bunch of stories about pediatricians removing tonsils from children and physicians amputating the feet of diabetics in order to make more money. That's right, Obama and those who created Obamacare firmly believe that the only reason why doctors over-treat (and perform regular acts of malpractice) is to line their own pockets. Naturally, they believe that the best way to rein in these evil doctors is to pay them less for over-treating their patients.

That leaves doctors in a catch 22. They will have a choice with Medicaid and Medicare patients between risking higher bills by being sued for perceived under-treatment or risking lower payments from the government for perceived over-treatment. Since so many doctors are still small business owners working under private practices, the best and safest answer is clear: Stop taking Medicare and Medicaid patients at all.

And now for something completely different...

I woke up to about two or three inches of new snow on the ground this morning. I was happy to see it. We've got a couple more inches coming down tonight, and the next storm may hit us on Wednesday of next week. Out here on the East Coast, we don't get the kind of crazy snow they get in the Northern Mid-West of the country, but it's enough to please me.

I live in a bi-level. Bi-levels are commonly called "raised ranches", but they aren't actually a genuine raised ranch. A ranch is a simple house design that clusters the kitchen, living room, and dining room close together at one end of the house and extends the bedrooms down a hallway in the other half. A raised ranch is one in which the front door leads to a full staircase, with the kitchen/living/dining area and master bedroom upstairs. Ground floor is usually made up of a den, possibly another bedroom, and sometimes garage space. A bi-level is half-and-half, with the door opening into a very small landing with half a staircase leading up to the kitchen/living/dining/bedrooms and the other half leading down into a floor that is halfway below-grade, usually with full or nearly-full windows that hover only a few inches off the ground outside.

If architecture of houses interest you half as much as it interests me, here's a link to an explanation of the bi-level. It's really a pretty common house type in my area, if you own a house that was built less than 50 years ago.

The link explains that some bi-levels are luxury, but most are 1,000-1,500sqft cozy homes that make the most of their space. Mine would fall into the latter category. The bedrooms are quite small (compared to older Colonials or Victorians, and compared to modern non-ranch homes). It suits me, though deep in my heart I still favor the Colonials and Victorians for their vintage flair.

I'm in a fairly rural area. Well, it depends on your definition of rural. People who live where the nearest town is 50-100 miles away and the nearest neighbor is 3 miles away think I'm positively urban. People who live within 5 miles of the grocery store and 1 mile of the gas station on a half-acre lot think I'm practically a forest creature. My own home sits on four acres of very beautiful Southern New England woodlands with wetlands adjoining.

So when I see snow outside my bedroom window, I see it lining every intricate branch of the multitude of trees outside. And that's just the way I like it.

Christianity in General

Reading other people's thoughts (not just the commenter on my post, but others as well) on Obama's Christianity leads me to decide that I should have a post that clearly defines what I do and don't view as being Christian.

I'm pretty inclusive and exclusive at the same time. I do believe that every denomination except for the very fringe has Christians in it. Sometimes you have Protestants who believe that Catholics are not Christian, or Catholics who believe the same of Protestants. I do not make that distinction. You can be a recognized member of the Catholic church, or any other denomination, or none, and that may or may not mean that you are an actual Christian.

What I define as Christian is what some call 'born-again', though I don't like that terminology because I don't believe that you have to be able to look back at a specific time when you Made Your Decision For Christ. I don't believe that you have to read off a Sinner's Prayer script. I don't believe that you have to have spoken in tongues.

However, a Christian has come to a knowledge of his own sin and his need for Christ's sacrifice on the cross in order to pay for that sin. Furthermore, as a follower of Christ, this Christian can be seen to change for the better over time, becoming more like what God would have him to be. Christianity starts where most religions end. Most religions end with the success or failure to obtain eternity/paradise. Christianity deals with what happens once you've acquired it.

Christianity necessitates growth. Whether you attend a "high" church or a "low" church, whether you have an altar or a podium, statues everywhere or no decoration, whether your Communion has real wine or grape juice, a real Christian will be changing every day. He will be becoming less selfish, more compassionate, wiser with his words, and stronger in God's truth. The process may be slow at times and fast at others. God may be leaving some faults until later, or even strengthening weaknesses that are not visible to others' observations. Still, over all, over time, you will see a certain humility and honesty in the behavior of the committed Christian.

Simply attending a church doesn't make you a Christian. Even being able to spout out the theology of a particular denomination doesn't make you a Christian. I know atheists and self-described witches who have more theological knowledge than the average Christian. What makes you a Christian is living it, having accepted Jesus's gift on the cross and been declared righteous in God's eyes. What makes you a Christian is having your name written in the Book of Life.

The New House and Obamacare

The new House started yesterday, with a reluctant Pelosi handing the gavel to Boehner, who immediately demonstrated that he knew just what to do with it. (No, he didn't hit Pelosi in the head.)

New House rules include a reading of the U.S. Constitution on the House floor today. That's a one-time thing, but there are other rules that are very nice, including a mandatory 72-hour online posting of bills before they are voted upon. People, they're giving us the responsibility. Find the website where they are doing this (I'll give you a link when I find it myself) and read those bills! Write to your Congressmen! The 2010 midterm election should be a beginning for the TEA Party, not an end. Now is not the time to sit back and start ignoring politics, not now that we have people in there who will listen to us! Now is the time to speak!

They also have modified "pay-go" into "cut-go", meaning that new spending must be paid for by cuts elsewhere, but tax cuts do not need to be 'paid for'. Considering that Bush's tax cut resulted in more tax money received by the Federal Government, I believe that we are on the wrong side of the Laffer Curve and 'paying for' tax cuts through spending cuts is unnecessary.

Here's the rule I like best: All new bills must be accompanied by a statement in the Congressional Record pointing out the specific Constitutionally-granted Federal power being exercised in order to justify the law.

Boehner has quickly shown that he's got the balls that so many Republicans have lacked over the past four or more years. The new regulations, set up to make laws more difficult to pass, have been waived for the first order of business which has also been declared exempt of all amendments. This first order of business is a call to repeal Obamacare, plain and simple. Will they do it? Yes. Will they succeed? Not likely, but our new Republicans already have a multi-pronged plan by which to rend Obamacare into unusable pieces.

Speaking of which, I want to show this around. Five top Democrat senators sent Boehner a letter warning him that the Senate will definitely block any repeal of Obamacare, so he may as well not try, because it will be a waste of time. Boehner's office sent back a prompt reply:

Senators Reid, Durbin, Schumer, Murray and Stabenow:

Thank you for reminding us – and the American people – of the backroom deal that you struck behind closed doors with ‘Big Pharma,’ resulting in bigger profits for the drug companies, and higher prescription drug costs for 33 million seniors enrolled in Medicare Part D, at a cost to the taxpayers of $42.6 billion.

The House is going to pass legislation to repeal that now.  You’re welcome.

- Speaker-Designate John Boehner’s Press Office

Thank you, Boehner, new Speaker of the House, for showing the rest of them how it's done.

By the way, YouCut has been moved from the Minority Whip website to the Majority Leader website. The choices have not changed since the previous YouCut week, but the blog strongly suggests that the next set will arrive shortly.

Obama's Christianity

When I re-started posting regularly in this blog about a week or so ago, I hinted at an answer I was writing in a forum, where I feared condemnation for my bold way of saying things. I'd like to address that answer and that issue today. It is the issue of Obama's religion.

I enjoy reading the articles written by a Canadian conservative columnist, David Warren, and part of today's article, perhaps, says it all:

U.S. President Barack Obama is reported to be attending church again, and shows a "fresh start," by persistently misquoting from the Book of Genesis, chapter four. "I am my brother's keeper; I am my sister's keeper," he suggests it says. Check out the original. It is a scene in which no sisters appear, and the brothers in question are Cain and Abel. In particular, the intellectual leap from "you must not murder your brother," to "you must create and sustain a vast and ponderous welfare system, that is funded by taxing him and borrowing the rest from China," is not Biblical.

Obama claims to be a Christian. He attends church (sometimes). He reportedly reads his Bible every day. Isn't that enough to prove your Christianity? It may be enough to prove that you are an adherent of most religions, to attend service and read the holy book. Christianity, however, is so much more than what you do. Christianity is what you are. You don't become a Christian just by reading a book and attending a service. You become a Christian by repenting of your sin and following God, taking His worldview as your own, and disregarding all others. A maturing Christian changes over time. Humility replaces pride. Self-sacrifice replaces selfishness. Honesty and sincerity rule your speech and mannerisms. You strive for a higher goal, and the ends can no longer justify the means.

Now I do not have the authority to judge who is going to Heaven and who is not. I cannot tell you if Obama's name is written in the Book of Life. Ultimately, that is not my decision. Many Christians are aware of this, and many will not even say what I am going to say, because they are afraid of being labeled as 'judgmental' which, like 'tolerance', is a neutral quality that has been redefined to carry a decided connotation.

However, many parts of the New Testament make it clear that we Christians of the New Covenant have a bound duty to judge on Earth. Being mindful that we were once all of the terrible sinners who are now coming to repentance, we are only to judge those who are "inside" (claim to be Christian) and only upon a decided lack of fruit from their supposed adherence to the Church. Specifically, if one is engaging repeatedly and unrepentantly in sin, we are told to speak to him alone, then take a friend, then bring it to the deacons and elders, with excommunication as the final and most severe of punishments.

We were given this power in order to ensure that the insincere were excommunicated before they sullied the entire religion, before Christianity could mean nothing, before our detractors could claim that Christians were no more likely than anyone else to avoid cheating, stealing, divorce, sexual immorality, etc. In that, the Church in the United States has, in many denominations, failed.

Supposedly, Obama has attended a Christian church for many years. However, I say now and boldly that a preacher who says "God d**n America", who puts racial politics before the blood of Christ, is no Christian preacher and his sermon is not that of a Christian church. As for Obama himself, he has consistently made decisions and given speeches that strongly push the tenets of Secular Humanism while giving lip service to Christianity. If this is some front for his real, true, Christian self, then he will have to face God for what he's done... and his fate will be lighter than if he is indeed pretending to be a Christian while living in pride, selfishness, and greed. In the end we will know his fate, and I hope it will not be what it seems to be right now.

I have heard some people bitterly announce that conservatives believe that liberals themselves are unable to be Christians, and the reason why we doubt Obama's Christianity is merely because he is a Democrat president. Let me lay that to rest right now with a personal story. One woman from my church, a friend of my mother's, is very liberal. She honestly believes that Obama is the best thing to ever happen to this country. She thinks W Bush is a crook and a villain. But you know why? She honestly thinks that liberalism is the best way to feed the hungry and help  the poor. She isn't out for some class retribution, and she couldn't care less about racial politics.

She and her husband are out there, in the city, bringing poverty-family children to Sunday School, helping their families get the food and services they need. She and her husband are out there in the January night, freezing cold, in the dangerous parts of town, with  no paparazzi, no teleprompter, no reporters, no cameras, no recognition... giving donated coats to street prostitutes.

I don't care if she's a liberal. I don't care if she's a card-carrying Communist. I'm proud to count her as a Christian, and I'll see her in Heaven.


Obama, on the other hand... May I be wrong. I do not want to see him burn for eternity. I honestly and sincerely do not, regardless of what his misguided policies are doing to my family and my country. However, unless he shows some signs of change, personally, regardless of his politics, I cannot in good conscience claim him as a fellow Christian.

Yesterday, I took my copy of Disney's Hunchback of Notre Dame to my grandmother's house. She hasn't kept up with Disney movies since Pocahontas, and I wanted to assure her that they were still turning out quality stuff. I went alone, because the kids are too young to see it, and we sat and visited afterwards.

This post has nothing to do with the Hunchback whatsoever.

We got to talking about Obamacare and its implications for the aging. It wasn't until I was driving home, however, that a really odd thought hit me.

Our parents take care of us when we are infants, when we're young children, patiently changing our diapers and mashing our food and talking to us when we can't talk in return. I've always thought that one good deed deserves another, and so this culture teaches us that we pay our gratitude forward in caring for our own children. Increasingly, we are teaching and therefore learning that the way of things is that the children are our future and of utmost importance, while the job of the elderly is to pass on and allow the younger ones to take the field.

I am now thinking that this is wrong.

Instead, this is what happens. When you are a child, your parents care for you. As you mature, however, they slowly begin to revert. As a person gets older, he finds his memory beginning to slip. His words become muddled. He may no longer be able to reliably clean up after himself. He may lose his teeth. He is 'regressing' in behavior and abilities to a more childlike state. That is when you pay, not forward, but back.

That is when the right thing to do is to care for your childlike elderly parent as that parent has cared for you. That is when you return all the gentility and dignity with which they have endowed you.

Of course you should care for your own children, but not out of a debt to your parents. You care for them because you love them and give of yourself, literally, for their creation and subsistence. You do not repay a debt to your parents by raising your children and abandoning the elderly to their fate. You repay a debt to your parents by caring for your parents.

 My grandmother is still in full possession of her faculties. She and my grandfather still live independently. I hope I will always find time to spend with them while they can still intelligently answer my questions and share their thoughts and discoveries. As they age and become more childlike, I hope I will be able to give them the same care, kindness, and basic human decency as they gave me when I was 'knee-high to a grasshopper'.

Homeschooling Schedules

Today my son starts back up from Christmas holiday. I homeschool him, and I built a two-week vacation into the middle of the year. I warned him yesterday. "I want you up, dressed, your bed made, and your breakfast eaten. I want you to present yourself with your pencil by 9am."

But isn't the point of homeschooling to have no schedule? To be able to do your spelling in your pajamas, to be able to work from 6am to 10am or from 2pm to 8pm if you prefer?

Well, that depends. If you have a child who is creative and independent and prefers to work on an odd schedule, then yes, by all means you can switch it up. Also, on some days, it is nice to know that you can relax as you work and you don't need to go through the hustle and bustle of other households in the morning. Many homeschooling households don't do this, however, mainly because they are trying to raise children who will be able to be up and ready to work by a certain hour.

(Some people talk as if the only reason why you would homeschool is for the benefits that you only find in homeschooling. The first and foremost thing they can think of is the schedule. Those who homeschool come to believe that they are giving their children a better education than they could find in public school, even if they ring bells to change classes. That one-on-one attention (or one-to-three, or one-to-five, depending on the number of students) just can't be equaled.)

Now what about the kids who don't keep a homeschooling schedule? Are they setting themselves up for failure, when they first try to work in the 'real world'? Not at all. The Work Schedule is a fairly artificial construct. Although many jobs require it, many more don't. The homeschool parent will want to make sure his child is capable of sticking to a schedule if necessary, but if his talents and interests are carrying him towards an on-call job, why force him to accustom his body to a hard schedule?

Why Liberalism fails

Despite decades of 'affirmative action', a disproportionate number of favored minorities go on to fail school and end up in jail. The percentage of people below the poverty line has wobbled within the same margin since the 1950's, despite increasingly massive government programs meant to end poverty. Despite legalized abortion-on-demand supposedly preventing child abuse due to unwanted pregnancy, deaths due to child abuse have been on an upward trend for decades. Everywhere liberalism has been tried, it has not only failed, but done so hugely. Many people who are drawn to liberalism are drawn, not to the failure, but to the promise. Liberalism promises utopia on earth, something which Christian Conservatism cannot. Why does Liberalism fail?

What is liberalism? There are many quick and pithy definitions, but none of them can quite encompass it, because liberalism, like so many worldviews, is complex and a simple definition will not adequately describe a complex system. This is my definition: Liberalism is a worldview that begins with atheism and secular humanism. Now I'm sure everyone's heard the old "liberals are atheists" rag and immediately dismissed it because, hey, lots of liberals are not atheists at all. However, many are agnostics, or they follow a 'buffet style' version of a religion that does not require them to go against any of their liberal beliefs. Liberalism quite simply works in a way that is always as close as it can get to being diametrically opposed to the principles in the Bible. Like the Ancient Romans, it permits any other religion so long as it is subordinated.

Liberalism becomes a slightly different creature depending on the venue in which you find it. In economics, it becomes socialism. In matters of personal freedom and responsibility, it becomes fascism. In the family, it becomes feminism. (I refer to the LAF description of feminism as it was overtaken by card-carrying members of the Communist Party in the 30's, not the very earliest stirrings of women seeking God-given rights and responsibilities in the Victorian Era.) Each time, whenever it has put its pet projects into effect, they have failed, usually miserably. Why?

The answer is because Liberalism fights against the ideas and beliefs best embodied in the Bible.

Now why the Bible? Am I some kind of nut? Why would Christianity be so big and strong and good that going against its precepts and lessons results in failure? Well, let me explain and qualify some of my statements. Many religions and belief systems are derived at least in part from the Bible, or the same principles are derived independently. If you follow the financial pointers in the Koran, for example, you will do well. However, those pointers were found first in the Bible. When other cultures do well, you will find that they are following Biblical principles, whether they know it or not.

Why the Bible and why Christianity? Because it is true.

The Bible is much more than just the long version of the Sinner's Prayer. It is a manual for the human condition written ultimately by the God who created us. As the inventor is ultimately the last word on how his invention was designed to operate, God knows best how we were designed to live. When we go outside that design, we run into trouble naturally and normally, not because God hates us or doesn't want us to have fun, but because He designed us to have fun in different ways and to find our pleasure in other things.

If you have always looked to the Bible for spiritual matters only, I would like to invite you to look at it again this year as a human manual in which you can discover details about how you were designed to live. I would like to especially recommend a thoughtful read of Deuteronomy, Proverbs, Romans, and both epistles of Timothy. You may come away from it with a new appreciation of the human condition... and a better understanding of why the principles of liberalism, when applied to it, will always fail.