NASA needs to be grounded, forever.

Mission control- come in mission control. To all of you boys and girls at NASA, slowly push back away from your million dollar toys, the professionals are here to do the job right. That's right, trying to re-launch the shuttle program now is a bit behind the times. Burt Rutan, the White Knight and Space Ship One are the wave of the future. While you were sitting on your thumbs trying to figure out how to keep your jobs, Spaceship One was successfully launched into space TWICE within two weeks and returned to Earth safely. Game over, give it up. NASA had a Cold War fueling the fervor of the 60s and 70s, but the good ol' US of A is back to worshiping the almighty dollar and corporate America is about to hand you your pink slips. There is money to be made in space and the idealistic relic known as NASA is sitting squarely in the way of real innovation. If you want a case of compassionate euthanasia in Florida; PLEASE put NASA out of its misery!
On a different note Farm Aid is back for a concert in Chicago. I wonder if John and the other dozen Mellancamps will be there with their hands out? At least they're asking for cash this time and not preaching about how overtaxing the G-8 nations will make the world a better place.
SOMEBODY TAKE MY GOVERNMENT AWAY!!

Keep your eye on the ball!

American politics can be summed up with the following two words: shell game. The politicians try as hard as they can to get the voters to focus all of their attention on something other than the true objective of the game. Sometimes they give you sex scandals to distract you and other times they simply play with words to get you to think that what they are doing is going to be good for you. The whole idea of campaign finance reform is a great point for the latter. The politicians have more power than they should have, power to make or break people, companies and even countries. That power is a commodity that forms a market where it is bought and sold. The politicians play their little game with you though and sell you campaign finance reform which they tell you will take the money out of politics. They know that they are the problem but have sold you on the idea that money is the problem. Campaign finance reform is now law but it hasn’t taken a dime out of politics. Why? Because the power is still there and there is still a market for that power. The only way to stop the money is to take away the market which means taking away the power that the politicians have marketed for so long. The politicians have also sold you on the idea that making drugs illegal will make them go away. Has it? No, drugs are still available because there is still a demand for them and a very enthusiastic supply base. The only thing the "War on Drugs" has done is make drugs that are dangerous to their users dangerous to everyone around them. Last night I heard that prescription drug abuse has doubled in the last decade. Now abuse of Oxycontin and Ritalin is higher than abuse of cocaine and heroin combined. Which is the way they want it. They don't want you to not take drugs they just want you to take their drugs. For society in general, alcohol is more dangerous than any illegal drug. It causes more domestic violence, more car accidents and more health problems than any other drug out there. The politicians already tried to outlaw it once with disastrous consequences. The same problems this nation had with alcohol prohibition are the same problems we see today with drug prohibition. The politicians have sold us something much more dangerous than drugs, they have sold us the idea that the government can do something about them.

Do fireworks=freedom?

Here we are, another Fourth of July behind us. Every year that I have been alive our government has gained power and individual citizens have lost freedoms. This year as in several years past fireworks were illegal to use in the state of Colorado. Our benevolent dictators once again felt the need to protect the ignorant citizens from themselves. So there I sat last night, all of my patriotic fervor packed into a state sponsored fireworks display. I will be the first to admit that the big fireworks are fun to watch. I would have been all for a few of the guys at the fire department setting up a fireworks fund for the community so everyone here could enjoy the big fireworks as they were set off by trained firefighters. Unfortunately, sitting there watching the fireworks I could not get my mind off of the idea that the dollars spent for those fireworks were forcefully taken by the government. The same government that recently outlawed almost all other fireworks. The government really hates competition when they're stealing from you. The phrase they used for what you could use was "Safe and Sane" fireworks. WHAT?? Fireworks by their very nature are neither. You don't use fireworks in day-to-day life because they are dangerous. People who make blowing things up their jobs don't use fireworks because gunpowder is too unreliable and doesn’t pack enough punch. Fireworks are only a manifestation of our celebratory spirit meant to be miniature recreations of the "rockets red glare...bombs bursting in air". They are dangerous and with every liberty there necessarily comes a responsibility. Too many parents don’t take their responsibility seriously and kids get seriously hurt. It only takes so many pictures of poor little Billy standing their with three fingers left and no eyebrows to open the door for the nannyists to walk in spouting about protecting ourselves from ourselves. And voila!! I'm sitting there on a Fourth of July "enjoying" my local state sponsored fireworks show wondering how much freedom I have left for them to take.

Alan Greenspan: Rock Star!?!

Here it is at last the Live 8 concerts, proudly brought to you by the same people you saw sleeping in the back of your economics class. They don’t want you to give charitable donations this time; they want you to ask your government to tax you out of your money after the government forgives debts to Africa. On that single basis along the debt relief is a bad idea; I for one don’t need more taxes. To make things worse, it WON”T HELP!!! The problem with Africa is not that the people are poor, the problem is that the way the governments work in Africa no one will ever have property or money. The dictator du jour found in most African governments creates instability. The laws in the African countries do not recognize individual property rights. They do not allow for banking systems like they do in the First World nations. Africa is made up of Third World nations not because they lack resources or they compassion of the G8 nations. It is because their governments will not institute laws that allow them to modernize their economies and become First World nations.
Let me attempt a little lesson in logic here. What all of these singers and movie stars are doing is called (in the Latin) argumentum ad verecundiam. Otherwise called argument or appeal to authority. They are singers! When Bono wins a Nobel Prize in economics he can lecture all of us about how debt relief will save Africans from their own governments. Until then as far as I am concerned the only thing Bono knows about economics is that when U2 puts out a new album his bank account grows. I wouldn’t necessarily want Alan Greenspan to put out a new rock album and I definitely don’t want Bono standing in as an economics professor.

Where's the nation going? Why are we in this handbasket?

The Supreme Court has been handing down some interesting decisions lately. One decision came down yesterday that was a 7-2 vote that made it impossible to sue a police department for not enforcing a restraining order. What I heard on the radio yesterday was that during the hearing a Supreme Court justice directly asked the legal council for the police department what an officer’s duty was if they saw a man being beat up by five other men. The response was a bone chilling nothing. That's right, police duties have been reduced to protect their jobs and serve them more donuts. The blue canaries really are not there to protect anyone or to enforce the laws, not unless they feel like it.
The court has been accused of being too conservative or too liberal; I am going to accuse them of something else, being far too pro-government. The Constitution is no longer regarded as a limit on government and instead the legal system is being used to shackle the American people. Government can now do pretty well what it wants to. These non-elected, non-representative officials have tilted the balance of power squarely into the hands of the government. I feel like Obi-Wan yelling at Darth Vader: "You were supposed to bring balance to the Constitution. You were supposed to defeat the nannyists, not become one!!!"
I will offer one piece of advice to the courts and the government in general. Not that I expect any of them to listen. Consider what you are taking away from the American people, because in addition to the rights you are taking away you are also taking away hope. When the people believe they have no hope left they will hand down a decision of their own: secession.

Got Freedom?

Rush Limbaugh has a saying: "Freedom has worked every time it has been tried." Of course he likes to trot that saying out in defense of our efforts in Iraq, but what about here, at home? If you equate freedom with the maximum absence of government then our freedom is in a hurting state of affairs right now. As Limbaugh himself has stated that our federal budget only grows. What politicians call cuts are only cuts in projected growth rates, not actual cuts into any department’s budget. Now we have the Supreme Court deciding that the commerce clause of the Constitution can be projected to include federal prosecution of marijuana users who grow their own plants and never cross state lines. The interstate commerce clause had already been bent out of recognition, now it is totally broken. We have a sitting President who has made his administrations policy one of pre-emptive warfare. If anyone cares about national sovereignty it should be the US, yet our policy is now to INITIATE hostilities towards other sovereign nations. I agree that freedom needs to find its way into every corner of this world but modern nations need to establish means that agree with the intended ends. How do you say we want you to enjoy freedom so we are going to attack your country? There we have it, the trifecta. Our congress is ignoring the constitution, our judicial is breaking the constitution to meet their needs, and the executive branch is invading other countries. You can try to rationalize any of these actions however you would like but you cannot dismiss the underlying truth that the government is ignoring the ground rules this nation was founded on. For the record, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights in essence an agreement between the government of this country and the people. It establishes the rights of the people and the limits of the government, not the other way around. The ground rules established by these two documents only protect the people if the people enforce the rules. Americans have taken the path of least resistance and allowed their freedoms to slip away from them. The fight to regain those freedoms will be difficult and needs to start soon before the Great Experiment becomes a footnote in the history books of the socialist future.

Triumph for the weird.

I know everyone and their dog will be chiming in on the Michael Jackson verdict today. However, that will not stop me from throwing in my two cents worth. The way I see it the verdict was a triumph for the weird. People can still stand there and talk all they want to about how an older man shouldn't have young boys in his bed but that is simply a moral judgment and what we saw yesterday was justice. Society has had a hard time distinguishing between the two lately. Too many moral crusaders have used the power of concentrated interests to put into place laws based on morality not justice. After this verdict I don't have a doubt that there will be ugly bills drafted all across our beautiful nation that will specifically say that what Michael Jackson did is a criminal act, not that Jackson would be caught dead living in most of those places. For that matter, I would be surprised if he stuck around the US at all. Given the toll this trial took on his health I can't say that he should feel all that welcome here when his own government tried to take him to task on charges that could not stand up to a trial by his peers. Ten counts, that is how many laws the prosecutor felt he could convict Jackson of violating. Not a meager amount of work involved there. He must have felt he really had the law on his side, didn't he? Or did he simply jump into the arrest and trial of a man he knew he would have a hard time convicting simply because he as an individual felt outrage over Jackson's moral indiscretions? My vote is for the latter. In my opinion, the prosecutor needs to have his decision reviewed by his peers on the bar and if they feel he did not press the charges with the intent of getting an actual conviction, then he needs to be disbarred. This is all assuming that the legal community has the courage required to police their own. We have enough moral crusaders writing the laws, we don't need more of them enforcing the law. The jury found Jackson innocent on all counts, but the peanut gallery of moral crusaders never will because they have, and will continue to confuse morality with justice.

By the people, for the people, where?

Being a child of the seventies I have never known a nation not belittled by the childish antics of modern politics. Men and women who are elected by a system that seems like but somehow is not democratic or even representative. I know there are people out there that say that if you vote that your vote counts and that the representative elected are your representatives. Why do I not buy that? Oh yeah, because the power brokers in the two main parties do their level best to quash any third party candidate. They have the market pretty well cornered on fundraising because who ever heard of a serious third party candidate. Since they are our elected representatives they get to write laws about how the elections are held, who can contribute to whom and who gets to be included in the debates. The media in this country also plays a part in this two party monopoly of power. Who is going to vote for a person who you have never heard of? How do you hear about people? From the media. I have hope however. With the advent of the World Wide Web and the blogosphere the word is getting out that there are viable alternatives to the status quo in Washington. I was raised by my mother who is in the Democrat camp in just about every area except gun control. Then I went off to college and learned something about economics. I was converted to conservatism, but not entirely. I backed Perot the two times he ran. When 2000 came around I had just graduated from the Colorado School of Mines, and with the limited number of choices available to a conservative in that election I voted for W. I had not discovered the Libertarian movement at that time and was hell bent on not voting for a Democrat who was set on prying into my wallet after I finally had some money in it. To my great surprise however, I had not voted for a fiscal conservative, just a social conservative, I had screwed myself in the worst possible way. W has no problems with a “be thy brothers keeper” state of affairs. He has allowed the Democrats to continue their spending spree on social engineering programs that in reality only benefit the government employees who administer the programs. Then 9-11 happened. The politicians went into full "we have to do something!" mode. Viola! The Patriot Act was born and that on top of years of deterioration of our civil liberties pretty well sealed the deal. Now you are saying, "You're writing this blog right now so you still have all of your civil liberties, what are you complaining about?" I'm complaining that the paving is being laid for the superhighway to Hell. Do you think the Germans still thought they were in good shape after Hitler got a firearms registration passed. Some of them may have been nervous but it wasn't until the government started using those registration rolls to start gathering firearms that people started to realize they weren't in control anymore. Thomas Jefferson said that "the price for liberty is constant vigilance." Without exaggerating, this literally is a mandate for paranoia when it comes to everything our government does. The Constitution and the Bill of Rights are just a listing of the base rules our government is supposed to follow. These two documents do not protect our civil liberties they merely define them. Defending our civil liberties falls squarely on the shoulders of those who would not live without them. H.G. Wells once said that "History is a race between education and catastrophe." I wonder if he understood how deeply true that quote is. Most people today just equate education with reading, writing, arithmetic, and science. I would say that the race more specifically applies to civil education. Without a thorough understanding of the civil liberties our founders meant for us to have, we have no idea what we have lost. We have no appreciation for how important it is to stop the government from encroaching on the liberties that make the people free and make the country great. People need to be taught a fundamental truth. Our country was founded with the idea that each person is endowed with certain inalienable rights. Inalienable means cannot be taken or SURRENDERED. The concept of living in a free country must include the idea that you have to be free to do anything that does not infringe on the rights of another citizen. Another basic tenet of living in a free country if that the economic system must be based on voluntary interactions between buyers and sellers. We currently live in a country where inalienable rights might be confused with alien rights and being an alien anything will get you arrested. The economy is hardly voluntary with all of the government controls there for your "safety".

Communism = Evil

Why is communism evil? Evil, isn't that a bit harsh? Not at all, communism is in fact anti-freedom. It is not as people would have you believe, a way to control corporate greed, it is the complete lack of freedom. The basis for this is the fact that communism allows for NO personal property rights. If you don't have the right to your property or the product of your labors, what rights do you have. You can count them on one hand without using any fingers. That's right, zip, zero, nada. To use an extreme example, in the pre-Civil War south whites owned black slaves. While not all slave were treated well, they were still property and the slave owners had a stake in taking care of them because they were property. Contrast that slavery to the institutional slavery represented by communism. In that system you aren't even property you are merely a resource at the governments disposal. Take a resource like wood. You can build a house out of wood for shelter or you can burn the wood for heat. Either use of the resource gains benefits for you. As a resource to the government, you could be valued for your use as a doctor maintaining the health of other people or you could be worked to death in a mine. Both gain benefits to the government. Being a resource isn’t a nice prospect. From each according to their ability, to each according to their needs. That is the essence of the Communist Manifesto. It completely ignored the most basic human nature. If you don’t have to work for something but still get it, you don't work. Even better, if you can force someone to make something for you, you will do it. Needs easily become wants. Citizens who cry out the loudest gain the most value from that system and the most able people are worked to death. There is no incentive to be a good worker. People who advocate communism, socialism, or fascism are pushing the outright destruction of the most basic right you have, the right to the product of your labor.

What about now?

We need a new "religion". One that stresses the here and now. One that proclaims the greatness of mans ability and mans potential. The religion that is dominant today is one that encourages obedience, humility, and a focus on the hereafter. They claim that faith is required. I don't want faith in an unknown. I don't want to focus on the hereafter. I want people to be true to themselves. I want people to understand that faith in your abilities will be rewarded in this lifetime and that your personal integrity is the true currency in life. Be amazed at the world around you not because you cannot understand why it exists but because you can appreciate it and strive to understand its unlimited complexity. I want followers who rejoice in mans ability to create a flowing river of knowledge that does not yield to stubborn thinkers but carves its way down through ignorance to the shining sea of the truth. The journey is not quick and it is not easy but it is inevitable. The truth is powerful not because it is obvious but because it is unmovable. You can see many layers of dirt on top of the truth and the shape the dirt takes may resemble the truth. People may pronounce that the image they see is the truth but when someone else wipes away some of the dirt to reveal the truth no one can honestly look at the truth and deny it. You may ask how will we know when we have seen the real truth and the answer is that after numerous other people have tried to dig further and found only the unmovable face of the truth will it be know to all. I want a "religion" that understands not only the potential of mankind but also the necessary journey that each person must take to realize their own potential. People must be free to follow their own path. Freedom requires obedience to freedom. You cannot talk about freedom with boundaries other than where another’s freedom begins. The state is not an individual and cannot be given freedom. The state cannot stand in for an individual and take freedom. The state can only recognize that each person is free and protect that freedom when it is violated by others. This is the only way people can live with freedom. There is only one economy that is compatible with freedom and that is capitalism. Only when people are free to deal with whom ever they feel like are they free. Any alteration to a market is an alteration to who you can deal with or what can be exchanged.

To Protect and Serve? Protect who?

I hate the American pre-occupation with the idea that police keep you safe. It's called the justice system because it provides justice not safety. What's the difference you ask. If someone commits a violent crime and is tried and punished, that is justice. If someone is doing something that you don't approve of and you have the police arrest that person in the name of public safety, that is tyranny. Police are a based on a quaint notion that you can put some citizens in government uniforms and supposedly give them powers that normal citizens don't have. The idea that this is a government by the people, of the people and for the people implies that it operates through the consent of the governed. You cannot give through consent a power you do not have. You cannot preemptively stop a crime from happening. If you saw a crime about to happen and ran and tackled the guy it would be you being charged with assault. So why should we think that the police would be enabled with a power normal citizens do not possess? Police ony ''protect" the populace by apprehending criminals, which by definition means they must have already committed a crime. Why does it take a police force to do this? Couldn't this function of the justice system be handled by private detectives and bounty hunters working towards collecting a fee. Why is it more fair to have a civil servant perform the task of a glorified go-fer? The common task performed by today’s police is mainly social control tasks based on moralistic laws not actual justice. Is breaking the speed limit really a crime? What about smoking a joint and then eating 4 Twinkies. Yes, that must be a crime against say, good taste? No, these are not actions that violate another citizens rights and are not crimes. The state should not be given the assumptive power to claim a violation against the public good. The public is a straw man that is comprised of individuals. Only individuals have rights. Certainly, post suggested speeds for roads and if someone is driving in a reckless manner and causes an accident, THEN you can hit them with a book as thick as you can get it. That's the line in the sand. Once they have committed an actual crime by violating a citizens rights the justice system needs to be there and fully enabled to deal with societies undesirables. But please, let’s do away with the notion that police can actually protect society from the very individuals that comprise it.