I was looking through this article, and it suddenly occurred to me - it reminds me of someone, someone very famous. Here is the excerpt from the article...

Wednesday, September 19, 2012


The article reminded me of someone we all know

I was looking through this article, and it suddenly occurred to me - it reminds me of someone, someone very famous. Here is the excerpt from the article...


Spanish woman who disfigured painting of Christ lawyers up, wants money
Spanish woman who made headlines worldwide for her botched attempt to restore a 20th-century painting of Jesus Christ says she has hired lawyers and wants royalties from the fees church owners are charging visitors...The local artist, 80-year-old Cecilia Gimenez, initially defended her volunteer work saying she was restoring the decaying "Ecce Homo" ("Behold the Man") portrait because no one else would. The before and after pictures went viral across the globe and tourists began arriving in droves -- but very few were leaving donations according to Ars Technica. The sanctuary's owners, the Santi Spiritus Hospital Foundation, reportedly made $2,600 in four days from visitors wanting to see "Ecce Mono," or "Behold the Monkey" as it's now called, Ars Technica reported...
The story blew up on social networks and put the northern Spanish town of Borja and its population of about 30,000 at the center of an international joke. Gimenez said she suffered from anxiety attacks, according to El Correo, and sought privacy. With upcoming litigation though, she "apparently recovered from the anxiety she initially experienced and is now looking to get paid," as Gawker said.


Even before I finished reading the article, I realized that this is a perfect description of Obama handling of America. He thought it was decaying, he volunteered to help, and now he became the international joke. And yet, he is trying to get paid back - i.e. to be re-elected. If anything, this is the best illustration of conservative criticism of the Obama's policies. He took over America when she was in trouble, and completely screwed everything he touched - to the point it is no longer recognizable. "Behold the Monkey" indeed.

I read an article today in yahoo.com and it made me giggle...

Romney Camp Breaks Precedent, Bars Press From Israel Fundraiser
JERUSALEM - In a precedent-breaking move, the Romney campaign said today it will bar reporters from attending a high-dollar fundraiser in Israel Monday morning.
The claim that Romney broke a precedent was very suspicious - I intuitively knew this could not be true. Obama is known for being very secretive about his fundraising - and this does not include the fact that his team disabled all fraud protections in his credit card system of fundraising (both in 2008 and in 2012) - which in turn allowed untraceable contributions to his campaign. I did a quick google search, and in 5 seconds found this article:


Obama holds DC fundraiser for re-election campaign

Read more here: http://www.kansascity.com/2012/07/18/3712054/obama-holds-dc-fundraiser-for.html#storylink=cpy


WASHINGTON - President Barack Obama is raising about $1.5 million at a Washington fundraiser to benefit his re-election campaign.

Obama met with 25 supporters at the upscale Mandarin Oriental Hotel on Wednesday, a day after several fundraisers in San Antonio and Austin, Texas. Tickets for the event started at $60,000 per person. The fundraiser was closed to reporters.
The Obama campaign says the proceeds will go to the Obama Victory Fund, a joint fundraising committee of Obama's re-election campaign, the Democratic National Committee and several state Democratic parties.

Read more here: http://www.kansascity.com/2012/07/18/3712054/obama-holds-dc-fundraiser-for.html#storylink=cpy

Apparently, Romney was not breaking any precedence - given that Obama barred reporters from his fundraiser only 10 days ago. The claim against Romney is obviously false - and it takes 5 seconds for anyone interested in the truth to refute the accusation.

BTW, speaking of foreign fundraising - just a few weeks ago same Obama held multiple fundraisers in Switzerland, Sweden, France and China. Not a peep from the media.

I cannot avoid the conclusion that if a mainstream media outlet is making claims against a republican which seem to be implausible, you need to immediately check if they are true, because most likely than not you will find that the media is lying to you. Note too, that a media giant like yahoo and and ABC has multiple people hired specifically to check the correctness of the facts they publish, so it is beyond doubt to me that such "errors" have to be done on purpose. Like when the NBC editing Zimmerman's recording to make him sound like a racist, or ABC launching an obviously groundless accusation that the Colorado shooter was connected with the Tea Party.

In short, never trust the mainstream media, never! Always check their claims.
Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.
The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.
Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers on the chain not in order that man shall continue to bear that chain without fantasy or consolation, but so that he shall throw off the chain and pluck the living flower.

Karl Marx


You fear the powerful eye of genius, that is why you encourage ignorance. This opium you feed your people, so that, drugged, they do not feel their hurts, inflicted by you. And that is why where you reign no establishments are to be found giving great men to the homeland; the rewards due knowledge are unknown here, and as there is neither honor nor profit in being wise, nobody seeks after wisdom.
Marquis de Sade

Their so-called religion acts merely as an opiate: irritating, numbing, calming their pain out of weakness.
Novalis


Religion is opium for the people. Religion is a sort of spiritual booze, in which the slaves of capital drown their human image, their demand for a life more or less worthy of man.

Vladimir Lenin


And now for something closer to today's American politics, a recent article from the New York Times:

WHO is happier about life — liberals or conservatives?... Scholars on both the left and right have studied this question extensively, and have reached a consensus that it is conservatives who possess the happiness edge. Many data sets show this. For example, the Pew Research Center in 2006 reported that conservative Republicans were 68 percent more likely than liberal Democrats to say they were “very happy” about their lives. This pattern has persisted for decades.

The article then goes into a long explanation of why conservatives are happier than liberals - but I propose a different point of view. Maybe the cause-n-effect equation is reversed. How about this hypothesis - unhappy people need the opium to dull their pain - and they turn to liberalism as a result.
Re-read the quotes I provided above, and substitute the word "religion" for "liberalism", and you will see an alternative explanation, an explanation which rings true to many.

Everyone knows the stories of the children of rich people, who without any talents or skills turn to political activism. This happens so often, that the people invented the terms to diagnose this condition: "limousine liberals", "champagne liberals" and "trust-fund liberals". Also, one should not forget the second (and much more numerous class) of liberals - the so-called "victims" of perceived "racism", "sexism", "lookism", "agism" and all other types of discrimination.

In truth, it's undeniable that liberalism often acts as an opiate to many people, a meaning to otherwise useless creatures like Ted Kennedy, and an excuse for millions of failed human beings in the ghettos and projects. If we want our society to progress, we need to rid ourselves of the liberal illusions that cloud our minds. This is the only way to revive our nation.


P.S. In my post the term "liberalism" is used exclusively to describe a bizarre American left-wing ideology also known as "progressivism". There is no doubt that true liberalism, the ideology that was birthed in Britain by Adam Smith, Hume and others has very little in common with American "liberalism". In fact, I consider myself a classical European liberal - following the footsteps of Adam Smith, Frederich Hayek and Milton Friedman.

In the words, of Marty McFly, "this is heavy."

I like the ex-bankster lawyer who says that these banks business model is to make as much money as possible by any means possible. Also featured is Matt Tiabbi, the man who coined the phrase "vampire squid" to refer to the Elite banking network.

I've recently re-read an old novel by the very popular Russian science-fiction writers, the Strugatsky brothers. The name of the novel is "The details of Nikita Vorontsov's life". It's a story of a man, who keeps reliving his life over and over and over. You may ask - how is this different from the "Groundhog Day"? Well, for starters, "The details..." was published in 1984, while the "Groundhog day" was shown to the public in 1993. Secondly, Nikita Vorontsov has to relive his life from the age of 14 to 54. Unlike Phil Connors, who was busy taking piano lessons, eating dinners and seducing women, Vorontsov spent 40 years in the USSR - from the year of Big Terror of 1937, through the Great Patriotic War with Germany, another bout of Stalin's horrors after the war, the rule of Khrushev and Brezhnev. One can easily guess that Connors had a somewhat more comfortable, although shorter life. But more importantly, the Russian novel was written by the Russian authors - and that resulted in one important difference - the complete absence of American optimism.

I remember long time ago, maybe in 1989 or whereabouts, I was reading a review of an American movie in a Russian newspaper. I will try to quote the relevant portion of the article him my memory as closely as I can - but mind you, it was many years ago. It went something like this: "The main characters find themselves in a situation with no way-out. But it's an American movie, so a "situation with no way-out", simply means the main hero needs to work hard to find the way-out - while in Russia, "no way-out" means there is no way-out, and there is no point in looking for one."

The novel offers no happy ending to Nikita Vorontsov - he is destined to repeat his life over and over again, and there is no way-out for him. He is permanently stuck in the horrors of the communist regime for all eternity - and he has to relive the dread of knowing about the coming war, as well as the future deaths of his friends and close relatives. There are, of course, what you would call "romantic episodes" - which actually start rather early - a 14 year old boy with all the knowledge and experience of an adult is bound to wreak havoc in high-school, but it's not a happy story.

There was one episode in the book that made a particular impression on me. Nikita's high-school friend recounts that they were routinely bullied by a group of "youths", who would take they money and beat them up for sheer fun. This was going on for about 2 or 3 years. One day the "youths" meet them on the way from school - and suddenly Nikita Vorontsov (an adult who relived his life for thousands of times, and who is now trapped in a 14 year old boy), instead of escaping, turns around and punches the group leader right in the nose. The "youths" are startled, and Nikita kicks another youth in the groin, grabs the third one by the hair and hits his head over the knee. The attackers finally regained their composure and beat him up to a bloody pulp - but this was the day when everything changed. From that day on, Nikita would try to ambush the "youths" when they were alone and beat them up. And this time it was different - Nikita was not fighting as a boy, his goal was not to insult them with his punches or show his superiority. Instead, he was "working on them" - inflicting as much physical pain as humanely possible. He caught the group leader in the lavatory, and was beating him up the entire lunch break - after the boy fell on the floor he continued kicking him with his feet, punching him in the face - the whole nine yards. Even the kids much older than Nikita were too horrified to try to stop him. Nikita's friend said that "such an ice-cold cruelty I have only seen later in the gangster movies - no-where else".

And this brings me to Obamacare and the Supreme Court deliberations. For the last half a century (if not even longer), the liberal judges treated our Constitution as toilet paper. They made decisions according to their own personal preferences with zero regard for people's opinion, precedence or the Constitution. But today, the situation has changed, and at least 4 of 9 judges care for the Constitution, and one judge is a liberal Republican - which is a far cry from a conservative, but still, better than the liberal alternative. The Court is supposed to announce its decision on Obamacare in the next few days, and the liberals are whining about the need for "judicial restraint", to be "moderate", to "follow the binding precedents" and the like. Patricia Williams, a law professor at Columbia University, described it thus:

"In the face of seven decades of precedent, the Supreme Court’s grant of certiori to six cases attacking the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act is an astonishing display of judicial activism. The decision to do so seems alarmingly consistent with the extremist philosophy of Clarence Thomas, who flatly does not believe in stare decisis. That the federal government’s power to regulate commerce is even being questioned is virtually inexplicable as a legal matter: the law deals with the $2.7 trillion health insurance industry, in a country in which 62 percent of all bankruptcies are occasioned by medical debt."


It goes without saying that the statistics on connection between bankruptcies and medical debt is utterly bogus - but that is a small peanuts, and I don't expect that Williams, who would be flipping burgers had she not benefited from racial preference policies our of colleges, to know the details. But most importantly - she never attempts to explain how can a person doing nothing be legally described as engaged in the "interstate commerce". As is customary, the left wants the Obamacare to be declared constitutional, and it does not matter what the logic, facts or the Constitution says.

Barack Obama, the self-proclaimed "legal scholar", and arguably the dumbest president in the US after-war history publicly announced that "
Ultimately I am confident that the Supreme Court will not take what would be an unprecedented, extraordinary step of overturning a law that was passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress.


All in all, this is the good old rehashing of the Brezhnev's principle - "What's mine is mine, what's yours is negotiable" - and the precedents be damned.

When I am reading the histrionics of the liberal class, my first instinct is that it won't be enough for the Supreme Court to declare the entire Obamacare unconstitutional. What I want is a hard blow, an ice-cold cruelty to make the American left understand their place. A simple 5-4 decision, based on a long and reasonable explanation why the "individual mandate" cannot be possibly considered to be part of the federal powers to regulate the "Interstate Commerce" is not sufficient. I believe the smack down of the Obamacare must be short and to the point, written in the language that the liberal can understand. Here is something that I think would send a message to the liberal class:


The right not to buy a medical insurance is a fundamental human right due to the penumbras which result from the emanations radiated by words of the 14th Amendment's Due Process Clause as well as the federal enumerated powers listed in the United States Constitution (Article I, Section 8, Clause 3) which are the Constitutional limitations on the federal powers. It is the decision of this court that the individual mandate is unconstitutional and is thus declared null and void. The pro-ACA side acknowledged that the "individual mandate" is inseparable from the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA), and this Court has no choice but to declare ACA to be in violation of the Constitution and thus null and void.


If liberals thought that penumbras and emanations were a sufficient reason to declare abortions a Constitutionally protected right, if this sloppy legal reasoning is considered to be the binding legal precedent, then by God, conservatives must use the same argument to declare Obamacare unconstitutional. Obama is known for using violent rhetoric during his presidency. Here are just a few examples of his fascistic rhetoric:

If you get hit, we will punch back twice as hard.
If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun.
I want you to argue with them and get in their faces.
We’re gonna punish our enemies.
Our job is, keep our boot on [their] neck.


Well, it's time for conservatives to get in the faces of their enemies and punch back twice as hard. That's the way of the world. The only way we can make liberal elites to be more "empathatic" for conservative causes is to make them live with their own sloppy arguments.




How we deal with our environment is a problem that should appeal to all reasonable people. Who wants to have smog filled skies and polluted water? While many people in this movement are sincere in their intentions to make the world a better place, those behind the movement have sinister motives.

When I was in the service, I was either working or enjoying free time. Due to where I was, I was cut off from church service or really having much of a life. Now I have family, friends, church, and community. I threw away all my dishes a few weeks ago because I did not have time to wash them.

While I appreciate my readers very much, most of the people who read here are of a like mind and preaching to the choir is not going to change anything. I've tried to get others who may not be of this mindset to read here and learn something, unfortunately I have a hard time getting my like minded friends to read here. At the same time, a Facebook post (which requires far less effort)is read by many. I am told by people I know that they read my Facebook posts even if they do not comment, not so much with my blog.

I've been fighting this battle for some time. I thought maybe turning this into a group blog would make it catch on, but with exception of Republican Mother, it's been just me for a while. The truth is, I reach far more people through my campaign radio commercials than I could ever hope to reach through blogging.

In Ecclesiastes we read:
To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven

Blogging provided me with an escape and way to vent my frustrations in a positive way, during very difficult times. It also was a vehicle for learning which will benefit me for all time. Never the less, this part of my life is coming to an end. I've made the commitment that I would remain blogging until the election and I will honor that commitment, but after the election, I will no longer blog.

The good news is, I'm not going to fade away, I want to go out with a bang. I plan on using the next five months to wrap up all the things I have had swimming in my brain for some time. From Darwin's fairy Tales to the origins of the environmental movement there is much I have to say.




In recent years, there has been a growing resentment of our federal government and its increasingly unconstitutional actions. Much of the frustration is concerning the disproportionate control of our land and resources by the federal government. Many of our state leaders have begun championing the cause of states' rights. While some of the talk of our leaders sounds good, it is lacking in substance.

We will never be able to stand up to Washington as long as we are dependent on federal funds. You can’t stand up to someone on whom you are perpetually dependent and expect to be taken serous. Utah receives more federal funds than it pays. Many have falsely viewed these funds as a great gift. There is no such thing as "something for nothing;" this money comes with strings attached.

A prime example of the money coming with strings attached is our federally subsidized public education system. As more federal dollars have flowed into our schools, the federal government has begun making demands on what and how our teachers teach. As this federal money and influence has come into the classroom, the quality of education has eroded. We can see a similar trend in other state-run programs that rely on federal money.

Obviously we are not in a position to refuse all federal funds overnight; it will be a process. This will not be easy, since many of us want the security of having Uncle Sam take care of our every need, but the longer we put this off, the more difficult it will become. We need to embrace the spirit of self-sufficiency that drove the pioneers who settled this state. It is time for us to get our house in order. Our state leaders need to have courage to say no to Washington’s economic pacification.

As State Senator, I will use my influence to reduce our dependence on federal funds to run state programs.



It seems that ignorance is a necessary condition to become a liberal activist. It’s simply astounding how little some folks know about the government spending. A few days ago, I left a comment on a liberal site yahoo – and got a reply which left me speechless. In original my post I pointed out two obvious things:
1. That the government (and American government is no exception) is very inefficient.
2. That our debt and deficit are mostly caused by an exponential growth of spending on the liberal holy trinity – Welfare, Medicare/Medicaid and Social Security.

The response from one of the liberals (code name WilliamM) was rather instructive. I will ignore the part where he claimed that the government run medical care would guarantee that every American gets the exact same treatment (an argument laughable on its face), and that the medical decisions would be strictly between the doctor and the patient (as if the government has unlimited resources). It’s rather apparent that the liberal activist had no idea how the economy works. But what made me laugh out loud was his apparent ignorance of the federal budget (which was coupled with a profound arrogance and certainty that he was right). Here is what he wrote:

Social security, welfare and medicare/medicaid are not the biggest portion of the federal budget. The biggest expenditure is the Pentagon. About 150 billion dollars is spent supporting welfare programs like the ones listed above. Annually, the Pentagon receives 700 billion dollars, with 300 billion set aside specifically for war.
In reality, the numbers that the activist quoted are not even close. Here is the truth. I am referring to the 2011 budget. In order to put things in perspective, I included also the numbers for the entire US government, federal, state and local – and I did it so that people had some feeling of how much money is spent by the government.

Total Military spending: $878.5 billion.
Federal spending on health care: $858 billion.
Federal, state and local spending on health care: $1,073 billion
Federal spending on pensions: $776 billion. The Social Security portion of this is: $730 billion.
Federal, state and local spending on pensions: $978 billion.
Federal spending on welfare: 473 billion
Federal, state and local spending on welfare: $745 billion.
Last but not least – Federal, state and local spending on education: $876 billion.

The total federal spending on Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and welfare is: $2,022 billion dollars.
Total federal, state and local spending on pensions, health care, welfare and education is: $2,600 billion dollars.

In case you are wondering if I covered the entire government spending, I must ad there are still other items which I left unmentioned:
Protection (federal, state and local): $320 billion dollars,

Transportation (federal, state and local): $277 billion dollars
General government (federal, state and local): $110 billion dollars
“Other spending” (federal, state and local): $460 billion dollars
I believe the number of Americans who believe in the liberal orthodoxy would decrease significantly if two things happen:
1. People stop guessing how the government spends its money and actually found out the truth.
2. People learn and understand the Law of Supply and Demand.



Trestin is most definitely busy running for office and probably much more, but I thought I'd just put up a few things that I thought were interesting in no particular order: