Deficit Reduction: I Want to Hear from You

I received an email from Patti Murray:

Over the next few months, the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction will need to find a balanced approach to addressing our debt and deficit, growing our economy, and putting Americans back to work. As Co-Chair of this bipartisan commission, I am working hard to bring members together around a bipartisan plan that works for families in Washington state. But I also know that we have a difficult challenge in front of us and that we need to marshal every idea and resource we can to complete this difficult task. That’s why I want to hear from you.

Please go to my comment form where you can submit your new, innovative, and most importantly – practical – approaches that could be implemented by the Joint Select Committee to help move our country in the right direction. At this critical time for our country your involvement is important to ensuring that we can find common ground solutions that work for real families. I look forward to hearing your ideas.

So, I responded with this:

Follow the Constitution

You're not going to like this, but the best way to improve the economy, the environment, prosperity and quality of life is to follow the official specification for the United States of America: The United States Constitution.

We're so far off the beam right now that to demand limited constitutional government seems extreme to some. Sadly, they might be right, since so many have become dependent on unlimited government for their livelihood, their subsistence, medical care, retirement, or just plain fraud.

To restore constitutionally limited government overnight would be inhumane and politically unfeasible. But we must begin the process. Because any regime that distorts or disregards The Constitution that they took an oath to uphold and defend is illegal, untrustworthy and dangerous.

Simply shutting down all of the unconstitutional government programs (and there are literally millions of them) would balance the budget overnight.

Our Governmental System

From an email making the rounds on the Internet:

The folks who are getting free stuff,
Don't like the folks who are paying for the free stuff.
Because the folks who are paying for the free stuff,
Can no longer afford to pay for both the free stuff and their own stuff.

And, the folks who are paying for the free stuff,
Want the free stuff to stop.
And the folks who are getting the free stuff,
Want even MORE free stuff on top of the free stuff they're getting already.

Now, the people who are forcing people to PAY for the free stuff,
Have told the people who are RECEIVING the free stuff, that the people who
Are PAYING for the free stuff, are being mean, prejudiced and racist.

So, the people who are GETTING the free stuff, have been convinced they need
To HATE the people who are PAYING for the free stuff because they are selfish.
And they are promised more free stuff if they will vote for the people who force
The people who pay for the free stuff to give them even more free stuff.

And -- when the free stuff stops we will riot, burn, steal and commit mayhem.
For the "rich" owes us! It is happening in England and coming here soon.

And that's the Straight stuff!

And that's the ungrateful entitlement mentality. I'll give charitably to those who are down on their luck, but the rest of you can take a hike. The government is not authorized to take what I earn and redistribute it as they see fit.

Online Gamers Crack Scientific Puzzle

My wife found this article on The Bellingham Herald website:

For more than a decade, biochemists could not fully decipher the structure of a key protein, called a protease, that retroviruses such as HIV need to multiply. Knowing it would be a key step toward developing better anti-viral drugs.

So University of Washington scientists unleashed an avid group of online gamers. Within three furious weeks of play, pitting teams of non-scientists against each other, the gamers delivered the first accurate model of a retroviral protease. Knowing the structure is a key step toward finding better anti-viral drugs.

(Continue reading...)

As you know, I have been very critical of using computer modeling as a substitute for actual experiments. Computer models are tautologies.

This is different. This is computer-aided problem solving that leverages human strengths, such as pattern recognition, the ability to reason, and our natural propensity for competition. Cut-throat competition is harmful, but as in any successful government, when human nature is harnessed for good, it is very powerful indeed.

Constitution Day Tea Party Crashers

Yesterday, I attended the Constitution Day Tea Party on The Guide sponsored by The Bellingham Tea Party. It was windy and chilly, threatening rain, and turnout was less than usual. The people who attended were very enthusiastic, as was the reception by passers-by. We had a lot of honks and waves, along with the usual number of extended middle fingers (from those who disapprove of The Constitution, I guess).

The crashers were interesting, though. They were in their late teens or early twenties. A young woman was carrying a sign that said, "SATAN loves you, just the way you are". A young man, wearing green eyeshades (they weren't glasses, exactly) had a sign that said, "I [heart] Dick" (I assume he wasn't referring to his good friend Richard). He spent a lot of time having simulated sex with his sign. The signs and behavior were obviously intended to attract attention, and to offend as many people as possible. They must assume tea partiers are a bunch of board-up-the-butt fogies that would be easily offended. Really? Most of us were raised on Monty Python, Saturday Night Live, National Lampoon, to name just a few. We were all young once, if not now, and we've seen it all, and done a lot of it ourselves.


(Crashers toned down their rhetoric and antics for this video, courtesy fellow tea partier)

If they object to tea party principles, it was impossible to tell how, or what. Their protest was too generic. So what was on display by the crashers was a complete lack of perspective and maturity, and complete lack of gratitude for the rights that they were abusing. I think our public schools are responsible, for not teaching young people about the brilliance of the form of government that the tea party was assembled to celebrate. If We the People fail to uphold and defend The Constitution, these crashers' generation will lose, within their lifetime, the right to poop on the very document that they mock.

Hilarious Global Warming Song Parodies

I don't know if these guys paid the license fees to perform these songs in public, so they might be pulled soon. Get 'em while they're hot!

Mugged by Mythology

Jeff Bergner at The Weekly Standard debunks the myths perpetrated by the illiberal control freaks:

Liberals believe the darnedest things.

Sometimes talking with liberals is perplexing. You never know what claim they will make next or what name they will call you. Take David Axelrod’s response to Standard & Poor’s recent credit action: He calls it the “Tea Party downgrade.” Amazingly, he blames the United States’ loss of its AAA bond rating on the one group that has sounded the alarm about our fiscal crisis. How did the president’s leading adviser come up with a label so detached from reality?

Comforting as it would be to dismiss this as a one-off comment, Axelrod’s words spring from the mental universe of liberalism. It is a vast sphere of assumptions that are found nowhere else. In an effort to promote the civility of debate that is so much in demand these days, here is a compendium of the myths underlying some of the strange things liberals say.

(Continue reading...)

Some highlights:

Myth #7: Liberals take the country forward and conservatives take it backward. Behind all these illusions lies a deeper notion: History is moving “forward,” and liberals are on the “right side of history.” But there is no intrinsic forward and backward in the historical process; there are only competing visions of America, none of which is guaranteed to succeed. If history is marching somewhere, we don’t know where. And at any given moment, the cold night of tyranny is just as possible as the clear day of enlightenment. Every step has to be won and defended on the basis of what best serves the interests of the American people. That’s why earlier generations believed that eternal vigilance is the price of liberty. And, by the way, wouldn’t it be interesting to know where liberals find the metaphysical foundations on which to rest their notions of “forward” and “backward”? Liberal orthodoxy denies a God-given moral order to the universe. Its secular “progress” is nothing but the fantasy of long-dead German philosophers.

Or this one:

Myth #10: No logical arguments need be made against conservatives. For liberals there are never two legitimate sides in a debate. There are only forward and backward, good intentions and bad intentions. It is not necessary to argue the merits of an issue with someone who is pointing backward; it is enough to locate that person as pointing backward. To do so is to make the case and prove the case. The result is predictable: The essence of liberal argument is ad hominem attack. Liberals do not confront arguments directly, any more than they confront religious claims directly; they go behind conservative arguments to vilify the messenger. If you disagree with liberal policy you are a xenophobe, a homophobe, an Islamophobe, a racist, an extremist, or lately a “terrorist.” As the president has said, you are too scared to think straight. Instead of answering your arguments, liberals aim to shut you up with snarky TV entertainment shows.

09/11/2001 -- Never Forget

We were attacked. It was exactly as it seemed: evil people following an evil man, misled by an evil doctrine, killed thousands of innocent men, women and children on that fateful day, destroying the lives and families of many thousands more innocent men, women and children -- the husbands, the wives, the kids.

It was not an inside job. We must not shrink from calling the enemy by his real name: Islamic Extremism. To use euphemisms, or to avoid "offending" people or their culture, is equivalent to committing national suicide. We must not allow the construction of a "ground zero mosque". Militant Muslims historically build a mosque at the site of every conquest. Don't be fooled. We cannot allow them to claim victory in that way.

Quote of the Week

It is incredible to think that in the Obama White House we went from passing bills without reading them to passing bills without writing them.

~ Michele Bachmann

 ...referring to Barack Obama's job speech, in which he exhorted congress repeatedly to "pass the bill" when there is in fact, no bill.

It's Dead Simple

I was inspired to make this simple little image:

I hope this image goes "viral". Feel free to use it any way you like (right click and save as...).

I'm praying for a Great Tea Party Uprising (GTPU) in 2012 -- in November, at the ballot box -- to finish what we started in 2010, replacing the rest of the dim bulbs with constitutional literates.

"The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground." ~ Thomas Jefferson

For my entire life, I have watched helplessly as the liberal illiberal progressives regressives gain ground while our liberties vanish. It is definitely time for a change -- away from oppressive, big, central government... back to the freedom and the responsibility to care for ourselves, our families -- and our neighbors -- as we see fit.

It is time to tell the illiberal control freaks that they can't have our property or our liberty! We own it!

On Being Governed By Scientific Frauds

This article over at American Thinker is a tad hyperbolic, but this paragraph makes it all worthwhile:

Nothing is as toxic as a really bad idea. Hundreds of millions of dollars are still being spent in "scientific" pursuit of disaster scenarios about the earth, fiddling with infinitely variable computer models. This isn't science; the burden of proof has flipped to the skeptics, which does not happen in real science. Albert Einstein had to predict observable outcomes before his ideas were accepted. Watson and Crick had to prove the helical structure of DNA before anybody took them seriously. But in Global Frauding it's the skeptics who are supposed to prove that the latest computer model is not true. If they manage that, the crooks just make up a new computer model. It's a sort of card sharper trick. A con artist can always move faster than the suckers.

(Continue reading...)

Truth, My Truth and Opinion

Arguing with progressives regresssives. I can't say it any better than Bill. Take it away, Bill!